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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arriving in St. Petersburg in 2014 to watch a military exercise. Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev
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| Is the Risk of Russia-NATO War Going Up or Down? |
| The international relations field spends a lot of energy thinking about low-probability, high-risk scenarios. There is probably none higher-risk than a nuclear war between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. |
| The scenario is not that Moscow or Washington would deliberately start a war. Rather, it's that an accident or provocation, occurring at a time of high tension, could set off an unintended escalation. Under the terrible logic of deterrence, rapid retaliation and something called first strike instability, this would spiral into full-on war. |
| When Max wrote a long article on that scenario, during a period of rising tension in early 2015, the political scientist Jay Ulfelder tried to indirectly measure its probability by surveying a database of expert political forecasters. He found an aggregate view of an 11 percent chance of Russian-American war before 2020, and an 18 percent chance that such a conflict would go nuclear. |
| In total, Mr. Ulfelder's surveyed experts assessed about a 2 percent probability of Russian-American nuclear war, the potential consequences of which include the literal destruction of humanity. That's very low, but it's still about twice the odds that any individual American will die in a car accident, and 180 times the odds of them being killed by a gun. |
| With all that's happening between Russia and the United States, and with Russia's expanding influence operations targeting Europe, is that risk going up or down? |
| David Wood, writing for the Huffington Post, argues this week that the risk is growing. He bases this on the frequency with which NATO intercepts Russian military jets flying without filing a flight plan or broadcasting a transponder code. The flights are considered provocations meant to intimidate European NATO states, and they create a risk of unintended escalation. |
| James Stavridis, the commander of NATO in Europe from 2009 to 2013, told Mr. Wood, "We are now at maximum danger" due to the risk of miscalculation, which he called "probably higher than at any other point since the end of the Cold War." |
| We might argue, though, that the risk peaked in early 2015 and has since declined for three big reasons. |
| Reason #1: The Ukraine crisis has settled into an equilibrium that, while terrible for the country's people, looks less likely to spiral into a regional war. The two scenarios that would most plausibly risk a wider war — either an American invasion to seize the Donbas region, which is controlled by Russia-linked rebels, or a Russian invasion to seize the Ukrainian capital, Kiev — appear to have come off the table. |
| Reason #2: Tensions between the United States and Russia have stopped growing. This reduces the risk of misperception: Washington has less reason to perceive a Russian provocation or accident as the start of a war, and vice versa. For an unintended war to start, you need the spark (an accident or miscalculation, such as a provocation that goes too far), but you also need the tinder. Doubt about an adversary's intentions, or misperceiving those intentions, is the tinder. |
| That risk of misperception is primarily driven not by the level of tension between the United States and Russia, but rather by the rate at which that tension is growing or shrinking. When tension is growing rapidly, both sides have to wonder at their adversary's intentions and at how far tensions will rise. That creates uncertainty and forces both sides to consider any incident as the potential start of a war. When war is seen as possible, both sides have to prepare accordingly, which makes it more likely. |
| That is not to argue that today's reduced tensions are a sign of greater peace. The reduction is based partly on President Trump's threats to abandon allies and step back from Europe. Longer-term, this increases the odds of another low-probability, high-risk event: the disintegration of European unity. If this happened, the ensuing disorder would increase the risk of war. |
| Reason #3: Russia has not moderated its aim of splintering Western unity, but it has shifted strategies. Its military provocations against the Baltic states did not achieve Russian strategic aims. Western military commitments to the Baltics grew and Baltic leaders did not bow to the pressure. |
| So Moscow has shifted to another strategy: using hacking and state media to influence the internal politics of its adversaries. That has proved far more effective — again, increasing the odds of European disintegration — but compared with military provocations, it carries a substantially lower risk of unintended war. |
| There's a big caveat to all this: The structural forces that create the risk of unintended war remain in place. The big two are Russian insecurity, which compels Moscow to seek extreme and risk-prone strategies to counter the perceived threat from NATO; and an unsolvable security dilemma over the Baltic states, the Baltic Sea and the Russian region of Kaliningrad, whose inter-linked geography makes it impossible for all three regions to be simultaneously secure. |
| This means that given enough time, something will happen to again spike tensions, at which point the risk of world-ending nuclear conflict will rise as well. |
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