Escalation Risks

My research on escalation risks applies international relations theory to contemporary conflict scenarios in East Asia, drawing on original empirical material, to examine how non-nuclear military operations could affect escalation dynamics. 

My article in Security Studies, published in 2020, frames a naval blockade in terms of the literature on escalation in great power wars to explain why this option retains its appeal in future U.S.-China conflict scenarios, despite concerns that a U.S. blockade would not be effective in coercing China to end a future war. Using military-technical analysis of a U.S. naval blockade of Chinese merchant shipping, I argue that this campaign would be feasible but very demanding of the U.S. Navy’s ships and relationships with East Asian countries. I also consider China’s military options for responding to a blockade, drawing on writings of the People’s Liberation Army.

My co-authored article (with Ben Buchanan) published in the Texas National Security Review in 2020 examines a U.S.-China crisis as a most-likely case for cyber capabilities causing inadvertent escalation to the use of force. Inspired by recent findings in the cyber conflict literature that question whether cyber capabilities cause escalation, we examine Chinese and U.S. perspectives on cyber operations, and aspects of their bilateral relationship, to further test this claim. We argue that if either country discovers that the other has hacked its important information networks in a crisis, the risk of inadvertent escalation in a future U.S.-China crisis cannot be dismissed.

Photo (above): posters promoting reforms of the Chinese military at the end of 2015.