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If you spent the entire Friday night and Saturday glued to the news about Prigozhin’s armed rebellion, you are either an IR-head, a Russia-watcher or the Ukrainian army running out of popcorn. The avalanche of hot-takes about the start of a civil war, theoretical debates about a coup or not a coup and an army of blue-check grifters with the latest FSB letters reigned the day. The pundits who rushed to their keyboards with the news of Russia’s impeding collapse saw their takes turn to pumpkins even before midnight: after Wagner’s mostly unobstructed march to Moscow and seizing Rostov on Don without any resistance, Prigozhin announced the retreat of his forces “according to plan”.
For those not permanently online, the weekend featured quite a hullabaloo with Wagner mercenary group moving significant parts of their troops to Rostov, on the Russian side of the border from the occupied Ukrainian regions, as well as moving fast towards Moscow and shooting down several Russian aircraft around Voronezh. Voronezh is already featured in the Russian popular vocabulary as a proverbial foot/penis one might shoot themselves into (bombit’ Voronezh). Life imitates art, or, in this case, folklore. After accusing the Russian government of fabricating the pretences for invading Ukraine, Prigozhin demanded the ‘heads” of Defense Minister Shoigu and chief of the general staff Gerasimov angrily asking for respectful attitude from the deputy defence minister Evkurov on tape. The morning of June 24th was tense to say the least with Putin’s angry accusations of treason on TV (without naming names) and Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova’s sanctimonious appeals to unity from a monastery outside of Moscow. The “heads” that Prigozhin demanded notably stayed silent, while a number of functionaries didn’t rush to declare support to the commander in chief.
The resolution came somewhat unexpected through (supposedly) Belarus’ Lukashenko’s mediation: according to the official communications, Prigozhin and his fighters were granted immunity “based on their military record” and Wagner’s head was supposed to leave for Belarus. After the initial mocking of the deal (and Prigozhin himself earning a record number of clown emojis on Telegram as a reaction to his retreat) and incredulity at the fact that you can dance in a church for two years prison time, but shoot down military aircraft and stage an armed rebellion for an exile in Belarus, Russian State Prosecutor’s office announced today that they are not dropping the criminal charges against Prigozhin. Interesting. Especially after one of the main TV pundits Kiselyov warning that the only thing that Putin does not forgive is treason, many are warning the Wagner chief to stay away from the windows. Prigozhin’s trolls rushed to praise the “wisdom” of everyone involved that prevented the bloodshed. After all, “you don’t want Russia to turn into Ukraine”, according to them.
So far, the best explanations I have seen come from Jeremy Morris, Tatiana Stanovaya, and Sam Greene (apologies for missing others). Jeremy’s central point is that Prigozhin’s stunt (not a coup) was an elaborate attempt at political communication with the power vertical. While I am not entire sure I agree with Prigozhin’s designation as “chthonic Karen” , Wagner’s chief’s threat to the regime stability was not insignificant. The true repercussions of the rebellion are yet to come as it’s unclear what exactly is Prigozhin going to do in Belarus or even whether he will get there, what will become of Wagner’s troops (will they sign MoD contracts? Will there be changes to the military command?). The short timeline of the rebellion does indicate it’s “not a coup” nature: there didn’t seem to be much coordination with other factions within Russia and specifically in Moscow. Granted, there were some unfazed street-cleaners and happy bystanders handing out food to the uniformed personnel in Rostov (remember, this city is one of the main areas of recruitment for Wagner), most population’s reaction was summarised in yet another Russian saying: a toad having intercourse with a viper. You don’t root for either.
When there is instability in the Russian state, people expect to see Swan Lake on TV. So far there was only a short Wagner interlude.
The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma sensibility.
Let me explain.
Some time ago, Kenneth Booth and Nicholas Wheeler wrote of a “security dilemma sensibility” that policymakers could (and should) cultivate in order to better manage the interactive processes that can lead to crisis and war, even between two actors who have only defensive intentions.
They described a security dilemma sensibility as:
an actor’s intention and capacity to perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others…the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s own actions may play in provoking that fear.
I first came across their book while finishing my PhD, which I did on the side while working in Obama’s Pentagon. Like (hopefully) everyone who studies international relations, I’d learned about the security dilemma as an undergrad. It made sense that non-aggressive countries could inadvertently make themselves less secure by taking measures that would be misperceived by others as threatening, leading to counter-measures also perceived as threatening.
But a security dilemma sensibility really resonated with me as a practical extension of the original concept. And so I found myself trying to bring this sensibility to bear over and again—on the “Korea desk” in the midst of two North Korean attacks on South Korea; among a small group of policy nerds trying to make the “pivot to Asia” real; as a one-time defense strategist contemplating “emerging technologies”; and as a public critic warning about the ways the Trump-Kim nuclear crisis of 2017 could (and nearly did) go sideways.
My role in these things was inarguably negligible; with the exception of the North Korean nuclear crisis, none of the policy paths taken reflect my counsel. Nevertheless, the security dilemma sensibility strongly colored how I made sense of these wide-ranging problem sets.
I was reminded of all this while reading a piece in Foreign Affairs by Tong Zhao, whose research on China-related strategic questions is among the most insightful in the business. In the essay, Zhao argues:
The dynamics among China’s political leadership, its policy elite, and the broader public have generated an internal feedback loop that is not entirely within Xi’s comprehension or control. This could result in China’s being fully mobilized for war even without Xi deciding to attack Taiwan.
Recognizing the presence of policy feedback loops is important—they describe how we can imagine security dilemmas escalating into conflict spirals. And it’s not surprising that feedback loops would be present in a rivalry that is intensifying right in front of us.
The valence of a relationship constrains available policy choices and how those choices are perceived, making rivalries self-reinforcing and stubbornly path dependent.
In China, as in the United States, the opinion-makers are virtually all hawks. Everyone is outbidding everyone else. Above all, nobody wants to be seen as “weak” or naïve about the enemy. And all the while, the national security states of both sides are doing everything that politicians allow to optimize themselves for war.
Fueling this is ethnonationalism—in Washington as in Beijing. Reactionary politicians feed implicitly racialized nationalist policies to publics whom they refuse to feed political democracy or economic security. As Yuen Yuen Ang saw in 2022:
The only people who are winning [Sino-US competition] are the ardent radicals, the extremists, and the autocrats on both sides. It’s so easy to be nationalists…You just need to scream and say extreme things and get people roused.
Neither Chinese nor US officials exercise sufficient control of the violent forces they’re manipulating for political, strategic, and personal gain.
We can’t afford to overlook the root sources of Sino-US confrontation, which include a nightmarish melange of exceptionalist nationalism on both sides, shifting patterns of capital accumulation under the previous economic order, and an unwillingness by either side to take a relational view of the other.
But being clear-eyed about the root causes of security problems doesn’t buy you out of taking seriously potential proximate causes of war, like feedback loops.
Now, I worry about whether China and the United States actually have defensive intentions. Xi Jinping’s jingoism has infected China’s governing regime, and the People’s Liberation Army is definitely taking seriously Xi’s priority to “be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan.” And while it’s impolitic to point it out in Washington, there is good reason to think that the United States could be a revisionist actor too.
But even though it can be difficult to know whether to code states as having defensive or aggressive intentions, it is not hard to find policy elites within states who are unquestionably aggressive or unquestionably defensive.
The trouble is that even individuals harboring non-aggressive, security-seeking motivations are trapped in systems whose pressures and incentives are much bigger than them.
This is true at the nuclear level. We can reasonably say neither country has the desire to launch a first strike, yet the nature of today’s technologies and Sino-US nuclear postures have locked the two countries in a structural security dilemma. As recent research shows:
The shift in the conventional balance of force in the region and the U.S. development of lower-yield nuclear weapons has led to greater fears in China of U.S. limited nuclear use in a conflict. Chinese strategists increasingly believe that U.S. nonnuclear strategic capabilities threaten China’s nuclear forces.
This is also why feedback loops are an important phenomenon to grasp. The point of Zhao’s warning is that we ought to be trying to “understand how certain efforts to deter Beijing can inadvertently exacerbate the security challenge.” It’s a matter of urgency that US policy thinks through how to disrupt—rather than blissfully ignore—feedback loop dynamics within the Chinese system.
How? By cultivating a security dilemma sensibility.
Our policies need to do more than give us psychological comfort and optimize for a war that nobody can win. They need to self-consciously prioritize preventing war.
So for every new basing access agreement we announce, for every new tariff or economic restriction we unveil, for every new military exercise or arms sale we conduct, we must ask: How does this make us more secure? How does this feed into China’s distorted view of our intentions?
Similarly, when China makes moves we don’t like, we must ask: To what extent are they responding to what we are doing?
I know that many a policy wonk worships at the altar of Thomas Schelling and therefore tends to view life as an endless series of rational games where you as an individual are just constantly trying to get the best of everyone.
But that’s exhausting and unsustainable, and probably self-defeating. It impedes adopting a security dilemma sensibility. And ironically, even Schelling stressed the importance of reassurance and the idea that adversaries needed to believe not just your threats but that they can get on peaceably if they don’t challenge your resolve.
This is cross-posted at Security in Context’s blog, as well as Van’s newsletter.
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