Last week, Israel launched a wave of air attacks against Lebanon as part of an attack on Hezbollah, heavily bombing densely populated areas south of Beirut. Israeli military leaders have claimed that the attacks have left Hezbollah “a different organization.”
Israel seems determined to expand its campaign in Gaza to a regional war, though. As Axios reported, “Israeli officials said their increasing attacks against Hezbollah are not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’”
Commenters grabbed onto the nonsense logic of this last bit of phrasing, the kind of obvious, contradiction that seems to suggest a source that doesn’t feel they need to convince anybody. But “escalate to de-escalate” has always been a bad idea. It has a long lineage in American foreign policy thinking as a powerful, but ultimately made up, theory of Russia’s own nuclear strategy.
The idea has its apocryphal roots in iterations of Russia’s military doctrine, which formally lays out the country’s military policy. This is a discourse at more than one remove from the reality of armed conflict: it deals with nuclear weapons, which have not been used in war in nearly eight decades, and publicly available statements of military doctrine, an imperfect guide to how a country might actually behave in a war.
There is no statement of such a doctrine in publicly available versions of Russia’s military doctrine from the Cold War period. Its first use as a phrase occurred in a 2015 Senate hearing. As developed by American foreign policy thinkers, “escalate to de-escalate” has come to mean intensifying a conflict through “coercive threats, including limited nuclear use,” in such a way that it will force the other side to end the conflict, on terms favorable to the one doing the escalation.
Like many other theories of…
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Auteur: Emma Claire Foley
