Escalators and quagmires: expectations and the use of force

Abstract

With the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, it became clear that the war for which Western military planners had so long prepared would never come. But with the Gulf crisis it became clear that the West did after all need to be able to make plans for conducting war in certain situations. Lawrence Freedman looks at the development in the 1960s and 1970s of ideas about the dangers of initiating any military action at all. He suggests that the danger described by both escalation and quagmire metaphors may have been overestimated and that they actually missed the point. The real danger to be guarded against in situations of war is not so much the uncontainable development of war as the risk of distortion in political decisionmaking. He writes that the responsibility for the higher conduct of war must be political rather than military: that from now on, realistic and unambiguous political objectives, consistent with national values, must be elaborated by the West before any possible military involvement. Holding alliances together makes this task harder—which is one reason why the UN may be a better basis for Western crisis action in future than most analysts have thought.