By: Matt Gurney
So. Ahem.
Has anyone else noticed that the news these days feels an awful lot like the scene-setting exposition that a lot of horror or apocalyptic movies need to get out of the way in the opening scenes, while we’re all being introduced to the characters we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in by the time the terrible things being aggressively foreshadowed start happening?
You all know the kind of scene, right? It used to be easier. You’d have a character chopping vegetables for dinner and not really listening to the radio news report in the background droning on about a military crisis. A frazzled housewife would be dropping the kids off at school while the DJ kills a few seconds between pop songs to mention that crazy story about some people apparently coming back from the dead and attacking people. Or a stern father figure would pause and gaze thoughtfully at the front page of a conveniently placed newspaper reporting on the ominous signs of an imminent disaster.
It’s gotten harder to pull these scenes together in the era of smartphones; nowadays you often need to have some secondary character breathlessly pause to show our protagonist the alarming tweet or video. But the function is the same: you signal to the audience early that something bad is happening, and that our characters aren’t really paying attention to it. They’re leading lives that are just too normal and relatable.
Am I the only one who has noticed that most of the international news today sounds a lot like those set-up scenes? Should we be worried?
Overall, I think no, not really. But I’m less confident in that than I was just a few months ago.
I don’t think anyone is going to deliberately go out and trigger a large global war. But there are a lot of overlapping factors that could come together right now and hand us all a war that no one really sought. And that no one, especially this country, is ready for.
I’ll make the case for my growing worry in a moment. Just for now, though, I want to reiterate that I don’t think this is likely, for the very simple reason that the various nations involved are all still rational actors. I’m using “rational” in the game-theory sense, which isn’t to say that their actions are smart or moral. It means that these various nations have goals and are attempting to realize those goals by making deliberate choices. They may make choices in error, or based on bad intelligence or assumptions, or choices that don’t go the way they intended, but they won’t deliberately do something insane, and will try to accomplish their goals while minimizing cost and risk.
In other words, they’ll likely be deterred from doing something that would, by their own logic, trigger a devastating enemy response. Deterrence is still a thing, and international crises have often been de-escalated by the simple reality that all the would-be combatants, when presented with the full horror of the consequences of their actions, decide to step back from the brink.
That’s the case for optimism. There is a case for pessimism, though, and it rests on two things.
The first is a simple observation that, in recent years, there have been a series of conflicts that seem to disprove the optimistic case above. Hamas started a war with Israel it could not win. Russia started a war with Ukraine it thought it could win, and then refused to de-escalate once it realized it could not. The U.S. seems to be in the middle of a similar miscalculation with Iran right now.
The U.S. position is a bit harder to model out or understand because President Donald Trump is a more erratic leader, with abnormally low pain tolerance, than most. This confounds the rational actor analysis a bit, because he seems as motivated by his personal and family goals as any set of United States national goals. His personal win conditions shift so rapidly that his “rational” choices on a Monday may be obsolete by Tuesday. But still. U.S. institutions are attempting to be rational, to the extent they can be, but the country still can’t figure out how to handle Iranian escalation, and Trump has been reluctant to fully commit U.S. military power. Iran, for all its weaknesses and the appalling nature of the regime, has consistently outthought the U.S. since the conflict began. That seems unlikely to change.
So, yes. We seem to be in something of a rut when it comes to conflicts we’d have expected to be avoided, or ended, not actually ending or being avoided. There is a case to be made that luck has helped us avoid major global conflicts for years, and right now, we seem to have exhausted our supply. Take that for what it’s worth.
But in the present moment, there are a series of factors, especially in Europe, that are probably raising the stakes of a major military conflict there. Some of that ripples out far enough to raise the risk of conflict elsewhere, but we’ll start with Europe and, more specifically, the risk of a conflict between Europe — and potentially NATO — and Russia.
The first issue is given away a bit in how I phrased that last sentence. If Russia were to take a provocative act against Europe, which it might well do for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment, it’s not clear that the U.S. would honour its NATO obligations.
Europe is still heavily dependent on the U.S. for military defence. Trump, Pete Hegseth and the rest aren’t wrong about that, alas. Europe does have a lot of troops and weapons, but it relies on the U.S. for some advanced munitions, for space-based reconnaissance and communication, for intelligence gathering and sharing, and for some logistics. The Europeans are trying to offset these weaknesses, but that’s going to be years of work.
Right now, a potential adversary — Russia, for our purposes today, but really anyone — cannot be sure that the U.S. would come to Europe’s defence, or how it would come to Europe’s defence if it did, or for how long. A potential adversary would also have reasonable grounds to wonder if the U.S. could somehow be enticed to either avoid entering a conflict or withdraw its support if it did.
My personal opinion is that the U.S. would honour its commitments, for now. I think the U.S. security institutions would insist on it and are still powerful enough to prevail. I am less confident that the U.S. would stay in the fight for long, especially if the adversary directly approached the Trump family with commercial incentives to end the fighting, even over the objections of U.S. allies. “Let’s make peace on terms that suck for your allies and your sons will oversee the reconstruction” is not an offer I’m confident the U.S. president would refuse.
In any case, even the uncertainty above is destabilizing. That we are even pondering the question means deterrence has been at least partially eroded.
The second major issue, alluded to above, is why Russia might want to do this.
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t. Vladimir Putin would understand the danger. But circumstances have changed.
Both Russia and Ukraine, under the brutal pressures of war, have rapidly evolved their militaries around drone tactics. Ukraine seems to be a step ahead of the Russians so far, at least in the big-picture sense. Russia cannot advance on the ground in Ukraine, and Ukraine is now methodically demolishing Russia’s economy, with particular emphasis on its energy and logistics sectors. Russia has not yet been able to solve either of those problems, and the costs are mounting.
But Ukraine remains dependent on Western aid. For Russia, this, combined with uncertain U.S. reliability, poses an interesting question: can the West be frightened out of supporting Ukraine by a provocative enough Russian action? If so, can starting a fight with Europe actually created the circumstances for Russia to defeat Ukraine militarily or force it to accept peace terms that Putin feels he can live with?
To that, we must add two more related factors.
As noted above, Russia is now one of the world’s most drone-forward militaries. It hasn’t been able to overwhelm Ukraine, but Ukraine is a peer in the realm of drones. The NATO nations, unfortunately, are very much not. This has been demonstrated in a series of war games between NATO forces and Ukraine. The Ukrainians have mopped the floor with heavy, advanced NATO tank-and-infantry formations that lack drones and, critically, experience with drones. Meanwhile, the alliance — mainly the United States — is running critically low on several important munitions, including long-range precision-strike missiles and air-defence missiles such as Patriots.
These two factors combine to create a bizarre situation: Russia today may actually have technical and tactical advantages over NATO. That hasn’t even plausibly been the case in a generation or more. But Russia might currently be better able to sustain a drone war than NATO could sustain a conventional war, and it’s not clear to me that the conventional force would defeat the drone force anyway.
Put all these factors together and we find ourselves in a pretty worrying place. Russia has reason to look at Europe and NATO and wonder if it could get away with something. Not conquering Europe. No one is predicting Russian tanks parading through Paris. But could Russia provoke a small fight on NATO’s eastern flank, win it, and then threaten escalation unless NATO accepts a peace deal that sells out Ukraine? Could it launch some air strikes? Grab a peace of land with “little green men” — Russian troops with no flags on their uniforms — and annex it? Trigger a crisis using intelligence along Russia’s border and then send in Russian troops as “peacekeepers?"
I don’t think it could do any of these things and get away with it. I think Europe would fight, with or without the U.S., and that Putin would rapidly find himself in yet another war he couldn’t win.
But I can definitely imagine a scenario where Putin decides to risk it. This would be an example of the “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine that is part of Russian military theory. How do you get yourself out of a problem? Create a bigger problem, one bigger than the enemy can tolerate, and then offer terms to end both.
If it works, you win. If it doesn’t, you’re in a lot more trouble than you were.
Still. Putin might be thinking about it. Russia has already been waging a low-level “hybrid war” against Europe for years, using deniable drone attacks and sabotage. Europe has been content to pretend to not know what Russia is doing, since calling it out in public would compel it to do things it doesn’t want to do. Europe likely also fears a U.S. refusal to aid them, which would reveal NATO to be finished. From the European perspective, for now, a questionable NATO is vastly preferable to a dead one.
But something has clearly changed in recent weeks. The leaders of Germany, Poland and France have all explicitly sounded the alarm about a possible major Russian escalation, and the director of the CIA recently suddenly flew to Moscow, reportedly to warn the Russians not to do anything stupid and to signal the U.S.’s willingness to honour its NATO obligations. Putin might be getting curious about what he can get away with, especially as more and more of his oil refineries go kablooey under an onslaught on Ukrainian drones his military cannot stop.
I noted above that my focus would be mostly on Europe, but that the problem was global. The global element here is the munitions shortages. Right now, other Western adversaries — China and North Korea — are looking at the war with Iran and the risk of war with Russia. And they’re no doubt wondering what they can get away with while the West is focused on the problems we already have.
So far, they are behaving. But if the Iran war continues, if U.S. and allied munitions stockpiles continue to dwindle, if Russia keeps Europe on edge or even makes a move, the rest of the world might decide to just go ahead and see what it can get away with.
This, it hardly needs to be said, wouldn’t be good news for anyone.
I don’t think war is likely or imminent, and I’m reassured by statements by some Eastern European leaders, who’ve said that while tensions are high and the danger is real, they don’t see any new imminent signs of conflict. Good! Let’s hope it stays that way.
But the danger of a major war is real, and rising. The world is a very uncertain place politically, and military technology is changing rapidly in ways that are potentially destabilizing. The NATO countries are powerful because they have large, modern militaries, but drones may have at least partially rendered them obsolete. The uncertainty alone is destabilizing. The less we are confident about, the greater the risk someone decides to roll the dice and see what happens.
A final note: even as the world is destabilizing and many of our allies are warning about the growing risk of conflict, I note that Canada has still not made a decision on a full replacement fleet for our elderly CF-18 fighter jet fleet. The reason for this is clear and is worth naming bluntly: Canada is using this as a bargaining chip in our trade war with the U.S. Until we actually make a decision, we have the ability to use the massively expensive program as leverage. Do we give it to a U.S. company, or to Europe, or both? The moment we make a decision, that leverage disappears.
That makes sense in the circumstances of the trade war, but will look recklessly idiotic if a major war does come in the next few years. If Canadian allies are dying in the skies while we do nothing, or if our pilots get wiped out in their ancient planes, “Well, yeah, but we needed bargaining leverage against Trump” is not going to cut it as an explanation abroad or at home. It’s time for us to get off our asses and make a decision.
Like, today, if possible. Because if we are indeed living through the first-act foreshadowing of a future Third World War thriller, it’d be nice to get some weapons lined up before we start getting into the more intense acts of this particular drama, no?
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Short version. Deterrence works. It worked very nicely during the Cold War.
Thanks, Matt. The part about Russia's "escalate to de-escalate" doctrine is particularly worrying.
The Economist summarizes Russia's recent grey-zone attacks on Europe:
"Italian jets on a NATO mission shot down an explosives-laden drone that had flown into Lithuania from Belarus, and others scrambled to intercept two Russian fighter jets that violated NATO airspace. In the same week, Russian drones struck a train in Ukraine within 2km of a Polish border crossing, soon after Boris Johnson, a former British prime minister, and several European security officials had travelled through. In the Netherlands the railway network was recently disrupted by the co-ordinated placement of pipes and cables on tracks around the country.
"More significantly, in August an explosive-laden drone was flown into a cargo plane used to transport weapons for Ukraine at Germany’s Leipzig-Halle airport, though it failed to detonate."
How European countries are responding:
"Many countries are taking defensive measures, such as installing protection against drones at airports and around other critical infrastructure. Some argue that Europe also needs to take stronger collective measures to raise the cost of hybrid attacks for Russia. It can retaliate by restricting the number of visas issued to Russians, expelling diplomats, closing consulates, imposing harsher sanctions and possibly by launching covert actions of its own against Russian interests.
"'What Moscow respects most is strength,' says David Cattler of the Centre for European Policy Analysis. Unless Europe shows it is tough enough to deter provocations, Russia will continue to escalate. So far, its provocations have had no catastrophic results—but they might have done. Obstructions on tracks might derail a train. Drone attacks at airports could bring down an airliner. The riskiest approach would be to let Russia keep pushing until something cracks."