Unforeseeable escalation risk alone can deter aggression even among cautious rational actors.

Evidence

One can argue that the Chinese or Russians were deterred by the prospect of major war, not just by the prospect of losing a limited war or winning one at excessive cost. Even if they were convinced that we would exercise every skill and caution to keep a war limited, and they were prepared to exercise skill and caution themselves, they may simply have felt that the process that leads to bigger and bigger wars is not one that they or we fully understand or can foresee, and that the risk, though numerically small, was appreciable. — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 430

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept that deterrence can ride on epistemically unreduced uncertainty about the escalation process, not on any confident forecast of general war.
• XREF: connects to: Limited war deters partly by exposing both sides to uncontrollable risk of escalation — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 425; Brinkmanship is placing oneself on an uncontrolled slope of shared risk — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 448; Threatening a small risk beats threatening certainty when the enemy’s controllability is uncertain. — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 427 (+4 more)

Related

• Limited war deters partly by exposing both sides to uncontrollable risk of escalation (similarity 0.86)
• Threatening a small risk beats threatening certainty when the enemy’s controllability is uncertain. (similarity 0.84)
• Refusing to prepare for limited war can be a deliberate deterrent strategy (similarity 0.84)
• Limited war’s main function is signaling escalation risk, not local military gain. (similarity 0.83)
• A losing side rationally abandons containment for deliberate risk-creation. (similarity 0.83)
• Deterrence can operate as an unintended byproduct of other actions (similarity 0.82)
• Deterrence rests on surviving retaliation capacity, not on existing destructive capacity. (similarity 0.79)
• A deterrent threat is only credible if control over its triggering is partly surrendered. (similarity 0.79)
• Compellence works by creating shared uncontrollable risk of catastrophe (similarity 0.79)
• Small-probability threats are superior to large certain threats in compellence (similarity 0.79)
• Fear of surprise attack feeds back into raising each side’s own probability of attacking (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Limited war deters partly by exposing both sides to uncontrollable risk of escalation #expands (0.92) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 425
• Threatening a small risk beats threatening certainty when the enemy’s controllability is uncertain. #expands (0.88) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 427
• Brinkmanship is placing oneself on an uncontrolled slope of shared risk #corroborates (0.85) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 448
• Deterrence works only when fighters can reliably predict battle outcomes #contradicts (0.82)
• A deterrence threat often hurts the threatener as much as the threatened #expands (0.80) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 32
• Most animal confrontations resolve without escalation because threats are assessed first #exemplifies (0.75) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 374