Nigel Gould-Davies: “If the West transgresses these limits, Russia will respond in new and more dangerous ways.'
A woman watches a burning oil depot that local residents said had been hit by a Russian rocket, fired from across the Dnipro River, in Kherson, Ukraine on Saturday, Nov. 19, 2022.“What are Putin’s red lines?”
There are three flaws to this reasoning. First, it assumes that red lines are fixed features of a state’s foreign policy. This is almost never the case. What states say, and even believe, that they would not accept can change radically and quickly. In 2012 President Barack Obama said that Syrian use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would invite “enormous consequences.
The second flaw of “red line” orthodoxy is that, in fixating on a state’s escalatory response, it considers only the risks and dilemmas this would impose on an adversary, and not those that the escalating state itself faces. For escalation means acting in ways that are more dangerous for everyone, and that had previously been judged too risky to contemplate. Such a decision must take into account the likely costs as well as benefits.
The concept of red lines has its uses. Its origins lie in the study of negotiation, where they define a state’s minimum conditions for an acceptable agreement. If these are not met, the state can walk away. Here, red lines are fixed and other states can find it very useful to discover what they are — as America understood when, for example, it decrypted the Japanese negotiating position before the talks that led to the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922.
While Russia is more invested in subordinating Ukraine than it was in deploying missiles to Cuba, the logic is the same. In 1962, America persuaded the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, that removing nuclear weapons from Cuba was, however unpalatable, a better choice than deploying them. Similarly, the West should now aim to persuade Mr. Putin that withdrawing his forces from Ukraine is less perilous than fighting.
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