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The Wire
24-05-2025
- Business
- The Wire
Against Temptation: Deterrence, Stability, and Strategic Folly
BSF personnel during a retreat ceremony at the Attari-Wagah border, near Amritsar, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. The Border Security Force (BSF) has said the public flag-lowering retreat ceremony at three locations in Punjab along the Pakistan frontier will begin on Wednesday, about two weeks after it was stopped following Operation Sindoor. Photo: PTI. Like many other economists, I have long been drawn to the work of Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. As one of the founding fathers of nuclear strategy, Schelling showed how thinking in terms of incentives, expectations, and risk can clarify the logic of deterrence. His core insight – that stability often rests on the fear of loss of control – has lost none of its urgency. South Asia, however, seems to be drifting into what Schelling called a ' zone of ambiguity ' – a space where states, emboldened by new doctrines and technologies, believe they can act without triggering catastrophe. But ambiguity in a nuclearised region is not a cushion; it is a cliff edge. Recent events suggest the margins for error are narrowing. For over two decades, mutual nuclear capability imposed an uneasy but real discipline between India and Pakistan. But recent Indian doctrinal and technological shifts suggest a deliberate push toward counterforce options – pre-emptive strategies aimed at disarming an adversary's nuclear arsenal. This reflects a broader turn to limited war under the nuclear threshold, where military engagement is seen as possible without provoking strategic retaliation. Few have explained the implications of this shift more clearly than Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang. In their 2019 article India's Counterforce Temptations , they describe how parts of India's establishment now view deterrence not as a shared constraint but as something to overcome. This shift is not merely military – it is political theatre: a way to dominate narratives, signal strength, and avoid the domestic costs of appearing passive. Proponents of this approach argue that the escalatory ladder now has more rungs – that modern surveillance, precision strikes, and drones allow calibrated military action without triggering nuclear thresholds. As the Ukraine conflict has shown, warfare is evolving in ways that blur lines and arguably expand this sub-nuclear space. But this supposed buffer is dangerously misleading. It rests entirely on the assumption that the adversary will consistently restrain its response. That assumption is neither stable nor predictable. Deterrence, as Schelling warned, relies not on control but on uncertainty. It works because each side fears what happens when events spiral beyond planning. From a game-theoretic perspective, India's shift risks accelerating a race up the escalation ladder. Each side may believe it can strike first without facing full retaliation. But this is not a stable equilibrium – it is brinkmanship disguised as doctrine. Over the past decade, Pakistan has repeatedly chosen restraint in the face of Indian actions: from the 2016 'surgical strikes' to the 2019 Balakot air raid – the first time a nuclear-armed state's air force bombed another's territory – and the 2022 'accidental' BrahMos missile launch into Pakistan's heartland. These moments required Pakistani decision-makers to judge the intent and scale of Indian attacks, and choose strategic patience over escalation. Never has South Asia's future hung on a thread so strained. India's response to the Pahalgam terrorism further narrowed the space for miscalculation. India dispensed with evidence, threatened Pakistan's water flows, and launched drone strikes on major Pakistani cities. In Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, Indian drones crashed in civilian neighbourhoods. These were not remote actions; they brought a crisis to the doorsteps of millions on both sides of the border. Indian strategists may take comfort in new technologies and missile defences. But deterrence doesn't rely on perfection – it rests on enough retaliatory capability surviving to make the risk unacceptable. Pakistan's doctrine of credible minimum deterrence was built on this logic. Credibility has never meant transparency; it means ensuring that adversaries believe retaliation will follow, even if they cannot predict how. Both India and Pakistan maintain ostensibly non-deployed nuclear postures to provide a 'long fuse' in a crisis. But how long is that fuse, really, in a region where political timelines are short, and crises unfold in minutes? Pakistan is likely adapting by reinforcing the survivability and unpredictability of its arsenal – through dispersal, hardening, and perhaps changes to command protocols. These are not escalatory moves. They are stabilising responses to a shifting strategic balance. As Feroz Khan argues in Subcontinent Adrift , India and Pakistan are guided by clashing logics: India appears to believe it can win a conventional war under the nuclear shadow; Pakistan sees its nuclear capability as a firewall against a growing adversary with which it has legitimate disputes to resolve. Herein lies the fragility: deterrence holds when both sides believe in mutual vulnerability. Any effort to script escalation or engineer 'winnable' conflict under a nuclear overhang is not strategy – it is illusion. Brinkmanship can hold as long as the other side chooses restraint. But that choice is not guaranteed. As Schelling warned, war often begins not with intent, but with things getting out of hand. A drone strike too far, a misread radar signal, a rushed political order – any could turn a crisis into catastrophe. The cliffs of peace in South Asia have held – but erosion is not collapse, until the day it is. The only sustainable path forward is institutionalised engagement: a mutual recognition of red lines and a revival of crisis management mechanisms. Strategic stability isn't maintained by exploiting ambiguity – it is secured by managing it, together. Dr. Ali Hasanain is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He was formerly a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Global Leaders Fellow at Oxford and Princeton universities.
News18
14-05-2025
- Politics
- News18
The Limits of Classical Deterrence
Last Updated: From the Kargil infiltration to the Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai carnage, and 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing, Pakistan has demonstrated that terrorism is not a deviation Deterrence is not a static possession; it is a performance, an act of will repeatedly staged before an audience of adversaries who test its authenticity with every provocation. As Thomas Schelling argued, it is not brute force that deters, but the artful manipulation of risk and consequence. However, when the adversary is not a rational state pursuing defined interests, but a militarised theocracy masquerading as a republic, one that nurtures jihadist proxies as instruments of state policy, deterrence ceases to function in classical terms. It becomes unstable, reactive, and dangerously porous. Robert Jervis long warned that deterrence depends less on capability than on perception, and misperceptions, especially when willful, can cause it to collapse altogether. Pakistan's deep state does not merely misunderstand signals; it distorts them, weaponises ambiguity, and thrives on the fog of war it helps create. Pakistan's doctrine of 'death by a thousand cuts" is an institutional strategy cultivated over decades. First articulated in the wake of the 1971 war, and pursued with renewed intensity after the failures of conventional engagements, this doctrine reflects the Pakistani Army's conviction that it cannot match India in open battle, but can bleed it through relentless, low-intensity conflict. Its strategic depth lies not in geography, but in deniability, in a complex ecosystem of terror outfits, training camps, and ideological sanctuaries nurtured by the state and its intelligence agencies. From the Kargil infiltration of 1999, which was planned even as Pakistan feigned diplomacy, to the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai carnage, and the Pulwama suicide bombing in 2019, Pakistan has repeatedly demonstrated that terrorism is not a deviation. These attacks are not the acts of rogue actors. They are systematically orchestrated by groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, entities headquartered in Pakistan, operating training facilities with impunity in Punjab and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The cross-border incursions are not aberrations but rituals of strategic signalling, aimed at exhausting India's patience while leveraging nuclear deterrence to shield against conventional retaliation. In effect, Pakistan has treated its territory as both a sanctuary and a launchpad, outsourcing strategic confrontation to non-state actors while insulating itself from direct accountability. This calibrated ambiguity, of plausible deniability wrapped in nuclear doctrine, has long boxed India into a corner, limiting its responses to dossiers and demarches. But the strategic calculus has shifted significantly post-Uri and Balakot, and now Operation Sindoor. India is beginning to articulate its own doctrine: one that recognizes that restraint without consequence is mistaken for weakness, and that strategic credibility must occasionally be demonstrated in fire, not words. Traditional deterrence theory, developed during the Cold War by thinkers like Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, and Glenn Snyder, presupposed a set of strategic conditions: rational unitary actors, a clear hierarchy of command, and an ability to link action with consequence through reciprocal threat. But the rise of state-sponsored non-state actors—terrorist groups, proxies, and ideological militias—has ruptured this framework. In such scenarios, the deterrer confronts what political theorist Martha Crenshaw termed 'strategic fragmentation"—where the actor initiating violence is insulated from punishment, while the state enabling that violence hides behind legal and diplomatic ambiguity. As Daniel Byman (2005) has argued, 'the state sponsor calculates the benefits of plausible deniability as outweighing the costs of global condemnation," turning the non-state actor into both weapon and shield. This renders classical deterrence largely ineffective, as the key requirement of attribution collapses. India's evolving strategy represents a meaningful attempt to reimagine deterrence under these conditions. By holding the sponsor accountable for the surrogate's actions, New Delhi is reconfiguring the deterrence relationship from dyadic (State A vs State B) to triadic (State A vs State B + Proxy), targeting the violence ecosystem, not just the visible actor. Operation Sindoor further advances this framework by demonstrating that India will no longer distinguish between proximate actors and the strategic architecture that enables them. In doing so, India is operationalising a doctrine of hybrid deterrence, one that speaks to the moral hazard of outsourcing war and offers a doctrinal template for other democracies navigating grey-zone conflict, from Israel's campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah to the U.S. post-9/11 counter-terror posture. Operation Sindoor was a paradigm shift towards creating deterrence for both state and non-state actors. With Operation Sindoor, India has made a few things very clear. First, it has established a template of predictable consequences. A pre-announced expectation that terrorism will trigger punishment. This reduces strategic ambiguity for both domestic and international audiences, but most importantly for Pakistan's deep state. It will shift the cost-benefit calculus in Rawalpindi, from viewing cross-border terrorism as a low-cost, high-deniability enterprise to one that carries an assured price. Second, predictable retaliation may paradoxically enhance deterrence credibility, especially in the context of repeated provocations. As Robert Jervis warned, deterrence often fails not due to weakness but due to mismatched perceptions, where adversaries underestimate resolve because previous actions were one-off, reactive, or too surprising to set a precedent. Therefore, by creating a pattern of anticipated and delivered response, India is attempting to recalibrate Pakistan's perception of its threshold for retaliation. Third, this predictability will also reduce the risk of miscalculation on India's side while transferring the burden of escalation onto Pakistan. Unlike surprise operations, which may spark panic or overreaction in a nuclear-armed state, a publicly telegraphed strike enables crisis management mechanisms to activate in advance. India retains escalation dominance by striking only terror infrastructure, thereby distinguishing between the Pakistani state and its proxies, while still raising the political cost of harbouring such proxies. top videos View all Lastly, from the perspective of international diplomacy, this shift also aids legitimacy. When retaliation is signalled, proportional, and avoids civilian or military targets, it is harder to cast India as the aggressor. The pre-emptive communication of intent aligns with emerging doctrines of 'responsible retaliation" seen in counter-terror campaigns globally, particularly post-9/11 doctrines espoused by the US and Israel. First Published: May 14, 2025, 13:42 IST
Bloomberg
06-03-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Real Ukraine Peace Talks Require a Real US Security Guarantee
Don't be distracted by whatever ' minerals deal ' the US and Ukraine may or may not hash out in the coming weeks, for it will not address the main obstacle to the kind of cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine that US President Donald Trump so badly wants to broker. That question is: How can third-party guarantors credibly assure the security of Ukraine after an armistice? Credibility: Every devil in every detail is wrapped up in that one word. The concept is so slippery that it's kept strategists busy at least since the American scholar Thomas Schelling (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory) analyzed types of deterrence during the early Cold War. We can't ask Schelling to weigh in on Ukraine today (he died in 2016). But here's what he wrote about American troops — and obliquely about their British and French partners as well — stationed in West Berlin at the time.
Asia Times
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Asia Times
The nuclear consequences of Ukraine losing the war
Since the Cold War, deterrence has been a fundamental principle underpinning peace between global superpowers. The idea is that if two sides have nuclear weapons, the consequences of actually using them mean the button never gets pressed. But the strategy goes beyond the countries which own the weapons. In practice, for instance, most of Europe relies on the US for a nuclear 'umbrella' of deterrence. And any country with nuclear weapons can offer guarantees of peace to others. This is what happened in 1994 when Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest memorandum in which Ukraine renounced its nuclear weapons from the Soviet era in exchange for a promise to 'respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.' This was widely seen as a good idea for Ukraine and the world, reducing the risk of a nuclear accident. But that memorandum has not served Ukraine well. As North Korea, India, Pakistan or Israel know, owning nuclear weapons – even against international agreements – ensures your protection. A piece of paper does not. And now, across the world, the ability to offer the equivalent of a Budapest memorandum to other countries has vanished. A key part of the theory behind a successful nuclear deterrent has fallen away. This is described in game theory – the mathematical study of strategic interactions – as the idea of a 'credible commitment.' To deter a military invasion, the country offering protection must be ready to do something that hurts its own interests if it happens. In the case of Ukraine, this has so far involved allies sending costly military equipment, financial support and enduring the small risk of further escalation of the conflict. Being a trustworthy guarantor is a matter of international reputation: a country that delivers is considered credible. But no one will trust a guarantor that breaks its promises. And while credible retaliation is important, so too is avoiding escalation. For it is also in everyone's interest to reduce the probability of a catastrophic outcome. Over the years, the small number of countries with internationally accepted nuclear arsenals (the US, UK, France, Russia and China) have developed nuclear doctrines. These are sophisticated and often deliberately opaque rules for escalation and de-escalation. The Nobel prize-winning economist, Thomas Schelling, argues that the uncertainty around these rules is what makes them so effective. It strengthens a system in which protection can be offered to other countries in exchange for them not developing their own nuclear capabilities. Game theory research has also shed light on the complexity of these rules of engagement (or non-engagement), such as the expectation (and necessity) of credible retaliation against an attack. Imagine, for example, that China launches a nuclear bomb that completely destroys Manchester. A rational British prime minister may prefer to end hostilities and accept the destruction of a major city rather than retaliate and risk the total destruction of human life. But for the deterrent to actually work, they must retaliate – or expect to see Birmingham and London disappear. Another difficulty comes in finding the appropriate response to varying levels of provocation. When Russian-affiliated soldiers were found guilty by Dutch courts of downing a Malaysian Airlines civilian flight with 298 people onboard, including 196 Dutch nationals, there was no talk of proportional retaliation. No one seriously contemplated shooting down a Russian plane or bombing a small Russian city. Nor was there any retaliation to Russian interventions in European elections, or to the sabotage of infrastructure in Baltic states, or to murders and attempted murders on European soil. And after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the reaction of the west was consistent with principles designed to avoid escalation. Sanctions were imposed on Russia, military aid was sent to Ukraine. But to abandon Ukraine now, forcing it to cede territory after three years of fighting, death, and destruction, would be a significant shift. It would represent a clear and deliberate abandonment of the international guarantees Ukraine thought it had. Game theory also suggests that the most likely consequence of abandoning those commitments is that no country will repeat Ukraine's mistake of giving up its nuclear capabilities. And no country will want to place their trust in potentially unreliable allies. Europe for instance, will aim to develop its own nuclear umbrella, potentially combining French and British capabilities. It will also hasten to integrate the next likely targets of Moscow's military ambitions. This will include the parts of Ukraine not annexed by Russia, but also Georgia, already invaded by Russia in 2008, and Moldova, partly occupied by Russia. The second consequence is that the West will no longer have a good reason to convince countries to abandon their nuclear ambitions. That means no credible deal for North Korea, no convincing offer for Iran, and even fewer prospects to end the nuclear programs of Pakistan, India or Israel. Looking at the ruins of Mariupol or Gaza City, and comparing them to Pyongyang, Tel Aviv or Tehran, many countries will conclude that a nuclear weapon is a better way to ensure security than any piece of paper. So if the West does abandon Ukraine, game theory suggests that the world should expect a proliferation of nuclear powers. Each will need to learn, as Russia and the US have, to live on the threshold of diastrous confrontation. But research shows that establishing a situation of reduced risk takes time. And that could be a time filled with increased potential for events reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis – and a growing belief that nuclear war is inevitable. Renaud Foucart is senior lecturer in economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
