How the Trump Administration Is Engaging in Escalation Dominance in Minnesota
I’ll post the TPM Reader DS note and follow up on the concept of “domination by escalation” and who exactly has the upper hand in Trump’s war on blue cities. I said in my previous article that the White House believed it dominated the escalation, that it was the stronger hand at every stage of the escalation. I think they are wrong. The simple explanation is that they think it is a battle of strength. This is not the case. This is ultimately a battle for public opinion. And that’s one they’re already losing. Intensifying the fight by force will make them lose even more.
The concept of domination by escalation arises from deterrence and Cold War strategic theory. DS shares some additional thoughts on this subject. But one of the essential aspects of these concepts, which emerged in the 1950s, is that they are highly theoretical, in both senses of the word. The real world is not as linear or predictable as one might imagine. There are different ways to turn a weakness into strength. And, as DS notes, the goal of domination through escalation is to prevent the weaker party from escalating the situation. It is supposed to be a framework of deterrence for the stronger power.
The other point I want to make in the DS email is the very right emphasis on the incredible discipline of those who are protesting and operating as observers. In each of these horrific murders, the victims act in a very disciplined, non-confrontational manner. This doesn’t happen by chance. If you participate in these protests, you risk being killed for doing nothing. This sounds grandiose or hyperbolic, but it’s true. Or maybe we wish that was hyperbole. But this is clearly not hyperbole. But the ranks of those joining the opposition to these marauding terrorist gangs are growing rather than shrinking.
Here is DS:
I enjoyed your excursion into Cold War nuclear game theory, but your invocation of “domination by escalation” raises more questions than it answers. You write
But a complementary explanation is this belief in the dominance of climbing. It may not be popular, but they think the public resisters will eventually have to collapse. So they are happy to continue climbing. Because they have bigger and bigger weapons and those who oppose them will eventually have to give in.
But the very principle of the escalation ladder was that when you are dominant at the current level, you don’t want to climb. Hermann Kahn introduced the “escalation ladder” in the context of nuclear war planning in the 1960s, and “escalation dominance” was intended as a model of deterrence, as an argument for how to prevent a weaker adversary from pushing to the point of mutually assured destruction. According to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy by Lawrence Freedman,
he defined [escalation dominance] as “a capacity, all things being equal, to enable the party possessing it to benefit from marked advantages in a given region of the escalation ladder.” Dominating in that particular region would force the other side to take the risk of taking the next step, which could be deadlier and more dangerous.
From what I understand, the idea is that when you control a “region” of the scale – the current level and nearby levels – you can avoid the risk of incremental escalation, salami tactics, etc.
Whether or not my amateur examination of nuclear game theory is historically correct, I think it is intuitive that escalation is bad for the stronger, more established side, while a weak adversary may want to take a chance on escalating the conflict to a higher level; they have less to lose and new influences could shift the balance of power. And this is how the US government has long behaved, both internally and externally. This is why the entire world has been collectively wondering about U.S. stocks over the past year. Why is the United States overturning the international chessboard when it is on a century-long winning streak?
And at the national level, it’s the same. Protesters recognized the growing dominance of the federal government over this “region” of the scale, adopting and enforcing incredibly disciplined, non-confrontational tactics. (I’d really like to see more reporting on how organizers keep things under control. What happened to the “riots are actually good” crowd?)
So why is the federal government escalating the situation? Why do they want to change the rules of a game where they have all the advantages? In the nuclear context, it would be like if JFK forced the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba, and then decided to drop a few nukes on Cuba anyway. The only explanation is either one completely disordered mind in charge of strategy – or several! – or a strategist who plays a different game, for whom his current stable dominance counts as a loss, so that the risks of escalation are worth attempting. (This could be because, for some in the administration, the only acceptable end state for the United States involves significant ethnic cleansing, which is not really possible outside of civil war conditions, or the need to permanently destroy the rule of law to maximize long-term corruption.)
