Executive Summary
Escalation of international conflict often occurs suddenly. As a result, escalation management regularly starts before decisionmakers can agree on what happened, who was responsible, or what an adversary intended. Moreover, contemporary hybrid operations can obscure attribution and disrupt communication, while political and military signals as well as disinformation travel quickly across several audiences. This report investigates how these conditions alter escalation pathways and how the Netherlands and its allies can manage the risks while preserving credible deterrence and freedom of action.
Three cases explored in this report show different parts of this problem. In July 2024, public statements about Ukraine’s potential use of long-range weapons against targets in Russia were followed by Russian nuclear rhetoric, exposing the gap between a limited policy signal and an adversary’s threatening response. Exploding parcels sent across Europe in 2024 showed how protective measures may be needed well before public attribution can support a collective punitive response. A massive drone incursion in Poland in 2025 showed how rapid military protection and allied consultation can coexist with uncertainty about intent and a disinformation campaign to undermine public trust.
The cases do not show that escalation is uncontrollable or that every hybrid incident leads to war. They show that escalation may accumulate below a certain threshold, move between military and non-military domains, or appear to jump between distant levels of conflict. Speed amplifies the consequences of uncertainty, but speed can also help well-prepared actors to verify information, protect people and coordinate a response.
The report concludes that contemporary escalation can no longer be adequately understood as movement along a traditional ‘escalation ladder’. Hybrid activities and technological developments create a more contested information environment and enable escalation to proceed through multiple, cross-domain and sometimes discontinuous pathways. To enable envisaging escalation in a non-linear way, the report offers an accessible visualisation of the ‘escalation lattice’ framework. This visualisation can support policy discussions and exercises by helping decisionmakers to identify multiple possible escalation pathways and to prepare for their consequences.
For Dutch and allied decisionmakers, the practical challenge is to preserve decision time and room for adjustment. This requires rehearsed procedures for sharing information and convening consultations, communication channels that remain usable in all circumstances, and clear distinctions between the evidence needed for protection, for public attribution and for more forceful measures. Responses to escalatory activities should be calibrated to impose costs or deny benefits while making their purpose and limits intelligible to the adversary, allies and domestic audiences.
Introduction
Contemporary conflict differs from Cold War-era conflict in several important respects. This is exemplified by the war between Russia and Ukraine and the wider tensions between Russia and NATO member states involving the use of drones, cyber operations, data, and information activities. At the same time, states increasingly employ combinations of military and non-military instruments below, around and across the threshold of armed conflict. Yet escalation and de-escalation continue to be viewed largely through concepts developed during the Cold War. The most influential of these is the escalation ladder, which represents escalation as movement across successive thresholds towards higher levels of conflict.
The escalation ladder remains useful because it draws attention to differences in conflict intensity, the significance of thresholds, and the possibility of moving both upwards and downwards. It should not, however, be interpreted as assuming that escalation has ever been fully controllable or predictable. Uncertainty, misperception, miscalculation and failures of communication have always complicated escalation management. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also illustrates the stakes of assessing an adversary’s intentions under uncertainty, although explaining the decisions preceding the invasion falls outside the scope of this report.
Nevertheless, effective escalation management depends on certain informational conditions: actions must be observed, their origins and intentions assessed, signals transmitted and interpreted, and decisionmakers given sufficient time to consider possible responses.
This report argues that contemporary escalation management is complicated by two mutually reinforcing developments.
First, decisionmakers operate in an increasingly contested information environment.
Cyber operations can disrupt communication and information systems, while disinformation, synthetic media and AI-enabled amplification can obscure events, manipulate perceptions and undermine confidence in attribution. The challenge is therefore not merely that decisionmakers possess imperfect information, but that the information environment itself can be deliberately contested and manipulated.
Second, contemporary escalation pathways have become more multidirectional, cross-domain and potentially discontinuous.
The growing range of military and non-military instruments creates more possibilities to move between conflict domains and levels of intensity. Hybrid activities may accumulate below the threshold of armed conflict, interact with conventional military operations or affect systems linked to nuclear decision-making. Escalation may consequently proceed through several domains simultaneously, move in different directions, or bypass seemingly intermediate thresholds. The concept of ‘wormhole escalation’ is particularly relevant because it captures the possibility of sudden movement between otherwise distant levels of conflict.
Speed connects and amplifies both developments. Contemporary communication technologies can accelerate information-sharing, consultation and coordination, but they can also spread manipulated information, intensify public pressure and compress the time available for attribution and deliberation. Speed is therefore not inherently escalatory or de-escalatory. Its effects depend on the capabilities, procedures and preparedness of the actors involved.
This report addresses two main questions:
– How do contemporary hybrid activities and technological developments alter escalation pathways and the conditions for escalation management?
– How can the Netherlands and its allies manage the resulting risks while preserving credible deterrence and freedom of action?
To answer these questions, the report first examines how a contested information environment and increasingly multidirectional escalation pathways affect escalation management. It then combines the escalation ladder, the escalation lattice and the concept of wormhole escalation in an analytical framework. Three cases from the current hybrid conflict between NATO member states and Russia are used to examine how these dynamics manifest themselves in practice and to identify implications for escalation management. The report concludes by presenting concrete policy recommendations for the Netherlands and its allies.
The methodology of this report consists of the combination of analysing relevant literature and other written, publicly available sources, and background conversations with experts and officials. The conversations were conducted under the application of the Chatham House Rule, which implies that no references will be made to the interviews.
The report is written from a strategic policy perspective and not from a military operational perspective, its target audience being primarily decisionmakers in capitals rather than military commanders in the field.
About the authors
Sico van der Meer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute.
Karen van Loon is a Research Fellow in the Security and Defence Programme at the Clingendael Institute, specialising in Arctic geopolitics, European security and nuclear issues.