Russian president Vladimir Putin’s declaration on September 12 that the war in Ukraine would directly involve NATO if Kyiv is permitted to use long-range weaponry is his most credible warning thus far in the conflict. The steady wave of Ukrainian drone attacks and the Kremlin’s failure to defend the Kursk region has highlighted Putin’s weak leadership.
The primary military concern in the Kremlin is that Ukraine could begin conventional destruction of Russia’s long-range bomber and ballistic missile submarine fleets, indispensable components of Russia’s deterrent. It would also expose Russian military industry, strategic radar networks, training facilities, and tactical airpower to rapid attrition and subject symbols of Russian power, such as Red Square itself, to an exhibition of political weakness. Already, Russian drones and missiles sporadically overfly NATO countries. With tensions ramping up, it appears the world is closer to a direct NATO-Russia confrontation than ever before.
However, wondering whether we are in the preliminary stage of a world war makes the tautological and erroneous assumption that the decision for war has always already been made. Leaders of revisionist states do make detailed plans for limited wars, like the one in Ukraine, before which they attempt to isolate their targets from potential allies. We can see this level of months-long planning in Adolf Hitler’s “Case White” invasion plan for Poland, the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, and the 1973 October War. This is also likely present in Chinese plans for Taiwan.
In these cases, careful (though often unsuccessful) diplomatic planning was undertaken by the aggressor to keep the conflict within strict political limits and secure a consolidated peace after the operation. Although reversing the organizational inertia of war preparations is difficult, it is nevertheless possible. Mershon Center professor Randall Schweller, in his book Deadly Imbalances, shows convincingly that the Second World War was the result of the failure of the United States and USSR to make even a show of joint deterrence against Hitler’s ambitions.
In his 1981 book Between Peace and War, Dartmouth professor Richard Ned Lebow explained that decisions to expand the war to win, termed “spin-off crises,” were usually desperate gambles to avert impending defeat. Germany’s initiation of unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917 is one such example. While crisis dynamics of misperception increase the likelihood that Putin will make a war decision to retaliate against a Western........