You almost never wind up where you expect to, and quite often you can’t even work out how you got there
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
For the last four years or so, strategists and pundits have been living in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar world, where conflicts that have no right to exist are developing in ways they have no right to develop. The War in Ukraine is nearly four years old now, but continues to confound all expectations and explanations. The on-off war between Israel (assisted by the US), and both Hamas and Hezbollah (each assisted to different degrees by Iran), as well as the abrupt end of the fighting in Syria, the developing crisis between the US, Israel and Iran which has now become open war, albeit one fought overwhelmingly by aircraft and missiles, have between them upended all of the assumptions about conflict that have governed elite thinking since the end of the Cold War, and left an entire generation which has known only Iraq and Afghanistan completely puzzled. So this is another of my public service essays, where I try to explain why things are as they are, and why strategists and pundits generally don’t understand this.
To be fair, there is much to be puzzled about. In Ukraine, the conflict is being kept alive only by massive transfusions of money, and apparently unlimited help with Intelligence and targeting to Ukraine from the West, which is also discouraging moves towards peace. Yet, in spite of many rumours and accusations, there is no evidence of formed western military units taking part in the war, or even providing direct lethal assistance in combat. The US, in spite of its deep implication, still presents itself as an honest broker, while the motives and behaviour of China and North Korea are not entirely clear. Negotiations, or at least “talks,” may or may not be going to happen, although Russia and the West have conflicting strategic objectives that don’t even seem to be on the same planet as each other. Israel sees itself at war with both Hamas to the South and Hezbollah to the North, but in neither case is this a conventional war with conventional objectives, and the current operations by Hezbollah are anyway in support of Iran, which was attacked by the US and Israel, but without either the anticipated rapid overwhelming victory, nor disintegration of the Iranian regime, and the war seems stuck for the moment in first gear, with much loose talk, once more, about “negotiations,” but no progress.
You’ll be relieved to hear that I am not going to produce yet one more analysis of all these events and their possible outcomes, particularly since there are areas where I have no special expertise (though that hasn’t stopped others, I accept.) Rather, this essay is about western attempts to use models to understand recent conflicts, why these attempts are generally unsuccessful, and how to understand conflicts better. I will focus in the first part of the essay on theories about Escalation, and then go on to talk more widely about the dangers of trying to use mechanistic understandings of the development of crises, often ethnocentric in origin, for the understanding and management of actual real-life problems.
As someone for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall is a relatively recent professional memory, it’s perhaps hard for me to appreciate that an entire generation of strategists and pundits was at university then, and spent all of its professional career until 2022 becoming more and more eminent in a world which has suddenly become more obviously complicated recently. I say “obviously” because the world always has been more complicated that most pundits and strategists were willing to accept, or able to comprehend: recently though, that increased complexity has become undeniable. Broadly, such people spent their career in a world where the discourse of crisis and conflict came in three flavours. One was the use of overwhelming force by the West (and especially the US) without much resistance, as in Kosovo or Iraq 2,0. The second was long and inconclusive counter-insurgency operations, notably in Afghanistan, but for the more adventurous there were also examples from the Sahel. The third was various theoretical conflicts, usually between the US and Russia or China, generally analysed by comparing the technical capabilities of the equipment used by the two possible belligerents. Of course there were many other conflicts in the world, including some (like Syria and Libya) where the West tried to involve itself, but these were complex and difficult to understand, and anyway not believed to hold any important strategic lessons of general application.
Clearly, none of these models of conflict is of much help in understanding what has been happening since 2022, but I want to insist nonetheless on the political weight and significance that those models have retained. It is very difficult, and in practice often impossible, for human beings to study complex situations and come to entirely inductive and evidence-based conclusions about what is happening. Almost always, as I’ve argued before, the hunt is on for some model which has been sighted elsewhere, is therefore known and believed to be understood, and can consequently be applied to a new situation. It’s important that in the last few years, the only alternative models available have been the progeny of those first generated during the Cold War, and utilised more recently in debates about how best to “deal with” or “contain” China. (It’s striking that before 2022 there was no serious public debate about how to deal with Russia. It was assumed that Russia was a declining power which would have little option but to accept what the West wanted, and if, for example, Moscow was not keen on Ukrainian membership of NATO, they would just have to put up with it.)
Summarising furiously, the ultimate intellectual origins of much that is now being written about the conflicts I’ve mentioned above are in Game Theory, first developed in the 1940s, and within that Escalation Theory or the Escalation Ladder, generally attributed to Herman Kahn in his 1965 book On Escalation, but drawing on earlier work. Kahn identified no less than 44 steps on this “ladder,” from peaceful coexistence to outright strategic nuclear war, and he and others proposed this as a model for understanding, and dealing with, the then Soviet Union. Many variants and alternative theories of escalation have been proposed since then (several dozen at least are known), but I’m not going to provide a taxonomy of them, because they all have essentially the same origins and characteristics, and they are all open to the same objections.
The origin of all these theories is in mathematical economics. The earliest work on Game Theory by John van Neumann, a mathematician, and Oskar Morgenstern, an economist, was specifically intended to apply to the field of economics various insights gleaned from research into how competitive games were played, where the actions of one player take account of, and try to anticipate, the actions of the other(s). This, it was argued, was a good way of understanding economic behaviour, whether between two different companies or two different nations. Game Theory has been and still is widely applied in all sorts of areas from economics to politics in an attempt to discover “winning strategies.” The famous Prisoner’s Dilemma is one example of such a search.
The temptation to apply Game Theory to international relations and conflict was hard to resist, and not long resisted. In the US (where virtually all the main players were based) it was part of the increasingly technocratic approach to defence which brought, for example, Robert McNamara to the Pentagon. It appeared to offer a “modern” and mathematically and scientifically based mechanism for understanding and perhaps preventing conflict. At this point, the two main superpowers had nuclear forces large enough to destroy each other, and there was an obvious interest in preventing that from happening, whilst still managing conflicts in a way that would resolve them to Washington’s advantage.
Many of those who elaborated these ideas into complex theories of conflict and proposals for strategies were economists like Thomas Schelling, who was particularly associated with “signalling” by potential adversaries and how that could be organised. Most of the rest were mathematicians, and the growing field was specifically intended to produce something like the “laws” of economics: a context-independent set of rules for managing potential conflicts and passing messages, as well as interpreting messages passed by a potential adversary. None of those involved had any foreign policy or military experience, or any experience of international politics but, just as McNamara the businessman from General Motors was regarded as qualified to run the Pentagon, so this group considered themselves competent to pronounce on issues of war, peace and security generally. It is probably not a coincidence that the main dissident among the group, Anatol Rapoport, had a background in psychology and biology as well as mathematics, and was born in what is now Ukraine and lived for some years in Vienna. His 1964 book Strategy and Conscience was, and remains, a classic dismantling of many of the political and strategic pretensions of Game Theory.
The essence of economic theory is, of course, the assumption of rational behaviour, and this group attempted to apply the same basic assumptions to the messy business of international relations. In reality, much economic behaviour is not necessarily rational, and the only way to construct mathematical models of it is to abstract much real-world behaviour away by assuming; for example, perfect knowledge, homogeneity of products and the various other radical simplifications of real life that are necessary if mathematicians are to be allowed to play. This can be defended in economics as the use of “simplifying assumptions.” In international politics, “simplifying assumptions” can at best be misleading and at worst are extremely dangerous, as history voluminously attests.
To be fair, many of these early theorists saw themselves as helping to design systems which would reduce the risk of conflict, and enable the resolution of problems. They also used Game Theory to show how apparently rational escalatory behaviour could get out of control. Thus, aggressive price-cutting by rival companies could, if unchecked, lead to both going out of business, just as threats and counter-threats and deterrent mobilisations of forces could actually lead to war. (Arguably this is what happened in 1914.) This is reasonable enough, but much of it is actually common sense based on experience, and it is not clear that complex mathematical theories are needed to describe it.
As I’ve indicated, much of this work in the strategic area was focused on problems of Escalation, and on trying to devise a system that would enable the careful, incremental management of conflicts and, with luck their resolution in ways short of actual fighting. But the term escaped into the wilds of the media jungle and punditland, and is now used in many different and conflicting senses, almost all negative. So let’s first of all look at the origin of the term. For a start, “Escalation” has a common derivation with the French word escalier, which means “staircase”, or “flight of steps.” An “escalation ladder” is therefore very close to being a tautology. My indispensable Dictionnaire historique de la Langue française, which takes both hands to lift, finds the origins of the term (originally from Italian) in the escale, once a kind of stairway for boarding ships, later by extension a stopover or waypoint on a journey: a sense still found in modern French. The word remains (just) in English, in the verb “scale” meaning to climb a rock, for example. But the fundamental meaning is of a way of progressing up and down a defined route in a series of steps.
These days, “Escalation” tends to be just a term applied to any allegedly hostile or threatening move by a nation or group. But if we are to use the term sensibly, in the cases of Ukraine or Iran, then I would argue that it has to have two essential components:
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First, it has to have a defined purpose, normally to achieve something that has not so far been possible at a lower level of escalation, whether this is political, economic, or military. Typically, this will be to force a course of action on an enemy, or conversely to oblige them to abandon a course of action they have already started. Likewise, its opposite—“De-escalation,” also has to have a purpose and an intended outcome.
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Second, it has to be either an action, or the announcement of a plausible action, which is both within the power of the state concerned to do, and which has a logical connection with the end-state that the country wants to achieve. This does not mean it will achieve the objective in one go, but it must at least bring that objective closer. The same logic obviously applies to de-escalationary statements and activities.
From this, we can see that much behaviour characterised as “Escalation” is just thrashing around aggressively, and making threats that may or may not be realistic. There is a particular tendency to confuse aggressive statements with escalation, and this has been especially true of Ukraine. For western leaders to say that they will “never accept” this or that outcome, or that they will make more money available one day, or will open arms factories in Ukraine, is not Escalation, it’s just empty posturing. The test of Escalation is whether it makes any short-term practical difference to the situation. Likewise, if by the time you read this the US has made another attack on Iran, that would not be Escalation. Indeed, since any attack must by definition be weaker and less successful than the first, it could be argued to be de-escalatory in effect, if not in intent, since by exhausting the US arsenal further, it beings the end of the conflict on Iranian terms closer.
This is not just a quibble about the meaning of words, it’s an attempt to look through the verbal fog that seems to surround commentary on both of these conflicts, often by people who don’t have much experience of how governments work in a crisis. (I’ll return to that point at the end.) So if we take the two crises discussed so far, then almost since the beginning the West, and more particularly the US, has lacked the ability to escalate in a serious fashion, as opposed to cranking the volume up further and further until they eventually reach 11. In the case of Ukraine, the West began with sanctions and then moved to delivering arms and training Ukrainian soldiers. This was genuinely escalatory, at least in theory, insofar as it was believed that both initiatives would be substantively effective, and that between them they would force Russia to sue for peace or even, in the minds of some, collapse into anarchy. Once it became clear that neither of these consequences were going to happen under any foreseeable circumstances, then the West lost the ability to escalate in any useful sense.
Providing targeting information and even assisting with missile launches represented a deeper involvement of the West in the conflict, but cannot change its outcome. Indeed much of what is called “Escalation” including seizing ships and talking about sending troops to Ukraine when the war is over, is essentially theatre, to convince western publics, and even perhaps governments themselves, that all hope is not lost, and that there must be some chance, however remote, that if only the war can continue long enough, then something, anything, will happen that will bring Moscow down. Actually deploying western combat forces to Ukraine would probably count as an act of Escalation, because it could theoretically change the political calculus in Moscow to make the Russian government act differently, if it sought to avoid an overt conflict with NATO. But whilst there are indeed signs that Moscow does not want such an overt conflict, there is no doubt that in practice, western forces in Ukraine would be targeted and quickly destroyed. Ironically, the effect of such deployments might actually be de-escalatory, because the West, having lost troops and equipment, would be obliged to be more accommodating to Russia.
Much the same is true in the case of Iran. It’s clear that the attacks at the end of February represented the maximum effort that the US and Israel could make. Since then, important military installations have been destroyed, aircraft lost, and stocks of missiles substantially exhausted. As this attrition starts to have an impact, and the (really) hot season arrives, it is clear that neither the US nor Israel has any new or extra conventional capability that could be used to force Iran to change its current policy, nor are there any new commercial or political levers available. Since the basic qualifications for Escalation are that you have something to escalate with, and somewhere to escalate to, and since neither the US nor Israel has either, it’s hard to see how Escalation could take place. A ground attack, for example, would be a pointless publicity stunt which, because it could not be expected to change the course of the war, could not really count as Escalation anyway.
The only possible exception, of course, would be the use of nuclear weapons. But here, it’s doubtful whether we are really in the area of Escalation as such, as opposed to unreasoning violence when all else has been tried. During the Cold War, NATO, with smaller conventional forces, had a policy of the early use of tactical nuclear weapons against targets such as airbases, hoping, according to Deterrence and Escalation theory, to force an end to the fighting by showing that it was serious about defending. But it’s never been clear what the use of nuclear weapons might actually achieve in an Iran-style situation, where they are used by the attacker. Assuming that the attacks were with nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missiles, and aimed at hard targets and thus were ground-bursts, then, whilst much of the region would be polluted with radioactive fallout, it’s likely that a large part of Iran’s military potential would remain intact, and some of it at least would be launched in an annihilating counter-strike on regional targets. (There are a host of other practical issues we won’t go into here.) Whilst we can’t absolutely rule out the use of nuclear weapons by the US, and especially by Israel, as some kind of blind, apocalyptic outburst of fury and hatred, born of frustration and defeat, almost by definition that doesn’t really correspond to any worthwhile definition of Escalation.
However, as I’ve indicated, Escalation is only one specific example of a powerful and influential tendency in strategic thinking since the 1950s. This substitutes the use of abstract, often highly complex, models, for any detailed knowledge of a given situation. The advantages are obvious: any number can join in, and only the most fleeting acquaintance with individual cases, or indeed with history, is needed. Where support from real-life examples is required, the same folktales are trotted out (if anyone mentions the Maginot Line or the Munich Accords once more I swear I shall scream) not to illuminate, but because the popular understanding of them, flawed as it is, enables you to start from the conclusion you want, and work backwards.
The greatest danger of these models is that they are seen as predictive and mechanical. Because something happened before, and because this new example can be argued to be similar, therefore the same or similar consequences will result. This deterministic method of thinking (Munich, as misunderstood, is perhaps the classic example) has probably done more harm to the actual management of crises in the modern era than any other single factor, especially because it leads to facile arguments about what should be done to avoid a “repetition.” Until President Xi mentioned it a few days ago, I’d actually forgotten that there was a book which claimed that the “Thucydides Trap” was a real thing and a potential guide to understanding future relations between China and the US. (I can’t remember the author’s name and I’m not going to waste time looking it up.) It is particularly dangerous when such abstract models are used to predict conflicts, and to qualify them as “inevitable.” There is no earthly reason why there should be a war between China and the US—one of the messages that President Xi was surely subliminally conveying—and misunderstood accounts of wars between Greek city-states are neither here nor there. Likewise, the idea that Escalation will get “out of control” has turned up frequently in discussions of Ukraine, where we have been told every few months since 2022 that “nuclear war is now inevitable,” because apparently some process more powerful than human beings is in charge. By contrast, as I’ve indicated, Escalation in the case of Iran has essentially stopped: the Iranians don’t want or need to escalate further for the moment, and the US can’t, anyway.
Part of this way of thinking is the dangerous belief that very different episodes in very different countries are mysteriously connected, and what happens here will influence what later happens there, in inexplicable ways. Thus, one of the many reasons for continuing the Vietnam War as explained at the time, was that withdrawal would “encourage” the Soviet Union to act aggressively in Europe and “worry” the Europeans, although there’s no evidence that either of those reactions actually occurred. Similarly, it was argued in 2022 that failure to “support Ukraine” would somehow “embolden China” to attack Taiwan, though no serious argument was offered for this.
As I’ll recount in a moment, some of these ideas are genuine attempts to explain poorly understood aspects of how crises actually unfold, but I want first to go a little further into the background. This way of thinking, all of its originators and most of its practitioners, come from the US. Most of the pioneers were mathematicians and economists of Central European origin, and it’s tempting to wonder whether there is somehow a parallel with the Vienna School’s development of analytic philosophy, by Rudolph Carnap and his colleagues, itself likewise based on the abstraction away of historical and cultural differences, as well as the entire history of philosophy to that date.
In the 1950s, the US was just coming to terms with its growth into a military superpower as a result of the Second World War. Many people were worried about the power that this might give the military and defence contractors. This concern was reflected in the popularity of films like Seven Days in May and Dr Strangelove, and had become so much of a popular cliché that Eisenhower’s speechwriter felt obliged to refer to it in the President’s farewell address. The theme was taken up by a new class of “civil-military relations” specialists, who studied the relationship between Civis (the state) and the military, especially in Latin America and Africa, where military coups were frequent. Many feared that the United States itself might fall victim to the military. In his distressingly influential book The Soldier and the State, the political theorist Samuel Huntington depicted a world of endless, bitter struggle for control between the military and the representatives of the State. (He had no experience of either, however.) This gave birth to an entire ideology, applied first to the US and then to everywhere else, which portrayed the military as power-hungry, eager to start wars and ready to overthrow governments unless kept rigidly under control. This control was to be exercised by specially-recruited civilian officials who would keep the military in check. Although it’s only a coincidence of wording, Huntington seems to have begun the confusion between the control and direction of the military by Civis, the State, and control by “civilians.” One is a feature of a democracy, the other is effectively rubbish. (As I used to point out to students, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were all “civilians.”)
There were two effects of these fears, both largely exclusive to the US. One was a deliberate fragmentation of the military, to make them weaker: as it is the four services, all the combatant commanders and all the separate agencies report to the Secretary for War directly, and there is effectively no central coordination, thus helping to explain the enormous waste and duplication in the US system. But the other, again largely confined to the US, was the growth not only of a civilian cadre to dispute power with and “control” the military, but a luxuriant forest of Institutes, think-tanks and Foundations, often funded directly or indirectly by the government. Now, only the naive imagine that reports by outsiders are ever directly translated into government Policy, but there’s no doubt that, especially with the interchange of staff between government, academia and research organisations, some of these mechanistic and frankly reductivist ideas found their way into the dominant mentality of strategic policy-making in Washington, as indeed did Realist International Relations theory in parallel.
The problem with these ideas was less that they sought to generalise US experience (though they did) so much as that they assumed the existence of context-independent strategic principles, which were the same everywhere, and which would be understood by, for example, the Soviet Union, in the spirit they were intended. Similarly, many in Washington today appear to believe that the messages they are trying to convey to Moscow and Tehran are obvious and will be clearly understood and acted on. And the most important assumption, clearly, is that governments work in at least roughly the same way, and understand the same things by each other’s actions.
In the Cold War, we now know that this was not so. (It wasn’t actually a secret at the time.) But Strategy, and especially Nuclear Strategy during the Cold War, was essentially generic and theoretical. There was little awareness among the strategic community of how the Russians thought, and frankly not a lot of interest. (Nobody ever asked the Russians if they shared the Mutual Assured Destruction concept for example: there are indications they didn’t.) The published (and so far as I know unpublished) work on Strategy seldom if ever took the insights of experts on the Soviet Union into account. In turn, this reflected the fact that the theoretical strategic community in Washington was so large that its members concentrated mainly on advancing their careers and acquiring influence with respect to each other. They had no need to learn Russian or visit the country.
Of course the situation in Russia was totally different. There was no equivalent of the civilian strategic community, and so the kinds of ideas that circulated there, and the policy options that resulted, were necessarily quite different. It wasn’t clear then (and it still isn’t, really) quite what the relationship between the Communist Party and the military was, on strategic issues. On the one hand, the Party had the final say on major strategic issues, as well as its network of Political Officers in all units at Company level or above. On the other hand, the Party was entirely dependent on the military for technical advice of all kinds, including issues which in Anglo-Saxon countries would be handled by technical specialists. In any event, the result was a system which functioned completely differently from that of the United States, and it is clear in retrospect that the two systems comprehensively misunderstood each other. The Soviet Union was an extreme example of what might be called the Continental Tendency of security organisation. In Anglo-Saxon countries generally, and by extension in the United States, security policy was largely a subset of foreign policy: wars took place “over there,” and loss might be embarrassing but seldom disastrous” It seemed logical, therefore, for diplomats and civilian career specialists to play a major role in policy-making, finance, procurement and any other issues.
By contrast, the Continental tendency is about defence of the national territory in land warfare, and the consequences of a defeat could be (and have been) disastrous. In such systems, the military often plays a much greater role, and dominates security and defence decision-making. This was even true in Western Europe: it was only after the Cold War, for example that the French began to develop a capacity for non-military inputs into the day-to-day running of defence. The Prussian tradition (copied largely by the Russians) is alive and well, with the departments of the German Armed Forces Staff playing a policy-making and implementation role. (I still remember thinking it curious, sitting behind one of our Ministers at a European meeting at the end of the Cold War, and seeing his German opposite number arrive with his Political Advisor: a General.)
Thus, the Soviet Defence Minister was not a “Minister” in the western sense: rather he was the military’s representative to the Politburo, of which he was almost always a member. This led not just to military domination of routine defence business, but to also a rigidly structured and highly technical approach. Soviet officer training put a great deal of emphasis on mathematics and engineering, and Soviet doctrine was highly prescriptive and inflexible. I remember looking at some Soviet officers’ training manuals in the Cold War: if you had to make an opposed river crossing, this was how you did it, always, complete with procedures and calculations of forces required. This produced an approach where force structures, for example were mathematically determined and so self-evidently unchallengeable. It also resulted in an inability to properly understand how political and military factors work together and against each other in a crisis, something that certain pundits from the former Soviet Union have still to grasp. So at the end of the Cold War, and in the context of an arms control treaty, data from the Soviet side showed they had hidden some of the main battle tanks they were supposed to destroy by re-subordinating two divisions to the Navy. (Maritime forces were not involved.) Oh yes, said the General Staff cheerfully, well the diplomats made a mistake and gave too much away, we checked the calculations and found we needed more tanks. It’s not a political issue, just a military-technical correction. It’s not clear, even with a civilian Defence Minister, how far things have changed in Moscow.
But in any event, the question is not which system is better, but that all systems are different. It’s bad enough to think that everybody is like you: it’s even worse to think that everybody is like everybody else. To expect to manage a potential crisis by sending political and military signals you are sure will be correctly interpreted and acted upon by the other side is a very ambitious objective, and one that depends for its practical effectiveness on the capacity of the other side to do what you want, even if it decides to do so. Thus, it was impossible for NATO not to have picked up the political signals from Moscow against Ukrainian membership of NATO, and impossible for them not to realise that Moscow had begun an escalatory process. But western arrogance and egotism made it just as impossible for these signals to be understood and acted upon: it was unthinkable that NATO would let someone else decide who could be a member, and anyway, what were the Russians going to do about it?
This pattern of theoretical hopes and practical disappointment is very common in modern history. Back in 1941, the Western imposition of sanctions against Japan for its invasion and occupation of Manchuria was logical enough, and indeed largely successful in damaging the Japanese economy. But the logical result—withdraw from Manchuria—was ruled out from the start by the configuration of politics in Tokyo, and the power of the military. Roosevelt’s decision to move the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii in 1940 was intended as classic deterrence, and not thought risky since it was believed that the Japanese lacked the capability to strike the Fleet, which at that time they did. The British had long had their own plans to send a deterrent force to confront a possible invasion of Malaya, but lack of money and the threat from Germany and Italy, as well as the last-minute unavailability of an aircraft carrier, reduced the force to just two battleships, both of which were found and sunk by the Japanese.
Such examples of non-receipt of deterrent efforts are found everywhere. Another, from the Cold War, was the deployment of US Intermediate Range nuclear weapons in Europe in the 1980s. European leaders had always been worried that in the event of a crisis between Europe and the Soviet Union the US would decline to get involved, and do a deal over the Europeans’ heads. Keeping US forces in Europe and therefore vulnerable to attack, was one way round that. But in the 1970s, the Soviet Union began to deploy missiles capable of hitting Europe: NATO had no similar missiles, so the Soviet ability to intimidate Europe could lead to the nightmare of the US doing a deal in its own interests and just walking away, unwilling to swap Boston for Barcelona. So the US was persuaded to deploy intermediate range missiles in Europe, notionally as a deterrent. But the Soviet Union saw these moves not as defensive but aggressive, and NATO-Soviet relations lurched to a low that was only rescued by the INF Treaty.
And so on and so on. The world seldom behaves as we expect, which is why clever deterministic patterns of Escalation and crisis management always come unstuck in practice. Obviously nobody is going to approach a crisis in a totally random or irrational fashion, but the one thing common to virtually all crises is that, sooner or later, you lose control of the crisis and it starts managing you. I watched this is real time in Kosovo in 1998/99, where NATO went less than a year from We really ought to do something about Milosevic, to We ought to issue stern warnings, to We ought to issue really stern warnings, to We ought to start making threats, to Well we might have to make these threats really serious, to Oh dear we’re going to have to drop a few token bombs to, My God this is serious, to Oh Shit, how do we get out of this war without destroying NATO? By the end, after a whole series of sideways shuffles, NATO, to its consternation, ended up more-or-less where those of us in the cheap seats doing the work always thought it would.
Which is to say that you almost never wind up where you expect to, and quite often you can’t even work out how you got there. So in a context where the current war goal of the US seems to be just the restoration of the situation before the war started, there must be quite a few people in Washington scratching their heads, and asking “how did we get here from there?”
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