Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Welcome to "Horns of A Dilemma," the podcast of the Texas National Security Review.

I'm Sheena Chestnut Greitens, editor of the journal, and I'm here today with our executive editor, Dr.

Ryan Vest.

We're pleased to have joining us for today's conversation, national security scholar, Richard Maass, author of "Legal Deterrence by Denial: Strategic Initiative and .

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the Gray Zone," which is featured in Volume 8, Issue 3 of the journal.

Rich is an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University and interim director of Old Dominion University's graduate program in international studies.

Rich, welcome to "Horns of a Dilemma." It's great to have you back on the show.

Richard Maass: Thanks for having me.

Ryan Vest: Rich, let's go ahead and start with some of the big picture items of your article here.

You wrote that international security competition in the 21st century is increasingly playing out in the gray one below the threshold of war, but is still very aggressive in nature.

Why did you choose to focus on this concept for your article, and why is that relevant to our readers today?

Richard Maass: Yeah.

First off, the gray one challenge, I think is one of the defining security challenges that we face today, both in international security more broadly and from a US foreign policy perspective in particular.

Gray one activities, as I talk about them in the article, basically entail two key elements.

They are aggressive in nature— they directly undercut state sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence — but they also stay below the threshold of war.

And it turns out that threshold is really important for even defining the idea of what the gray one is, and in constituting the particular challenges that it poses to policymakers.

And so the gray one is particularly relevant to current strategic debates for a number of reasons, but in particular because, as folks widely recognize that the risk of major war has declined considerably— say from a century ago — factors like nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence and so on.

There's big literatures on this and in security studies, right?

They disincentivize states from launching major wars of conquest, and the US has been a big part of that as well through its diplomacy and alliances and such— disincentivizing and actively trying to deter other states from trying to conquer each other.

And so as a result, the kinds of security competition that we see these days are much more in that gray area where you don't see major land armies crossing borders too often.

Instead you often see a lot of other kinds of practices that nevertheless cut at the core of state sovereignty and security.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Let me follow up a little bit on that.

One of the things that I found really intriguing about the article is that you lay out what it is that makes the gray one attractive to aggressor states in the international system today.

Can you give our listeners a little bit more context on that?

Richard Maass: Sure.

So, the gray one offers an attractive arena for international competition, really because it avoids that threshold between war and peace.

And so, in doing so, it avoids the main international normative focal point that legitimizes military reactions.

And so this is where the article really brings together a lot of the scholarship on international law on one hand and security studies in the other.

And these are literature that don't really tend to talk to each other very much, but I think that's really a big oversight, and something that means that both end up being a bit less informed than they should be because, especially in security studies, say, the concepts that we deal with are constituted through international norms.

So, you know, take the idea of war — when are two countries at war and when are they not?

It's when they cross a certain threshold that is collectively kind of through a shared understanding, understood to constitute war.

And if we think about something like the challenges associated with deterrence, which of course are central to security studies, well, what kinds of acts are recognized as acts of war and likely to meet military retaliation?

What kinds of acts fall below that threshold, and so might be employed with relatively little fear of immediate escalation into a broader conflict?

It's kind of through the shared collective understandings of where that line is that these different kinds of behaviors are constituted, and that has massive consequences for the kinds of behavior that are incentivized within the system.

So the big appeal of gray one activities for aggressors is that they allow the aggressors to undercut other states' sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, without overtly crossing that line and really provoking a likely military retaliation that's gonna end up being very costly and risky for all parties involved.

Ryan Vest: I'd like to expand on that just a little bit here.

You talk a lot about the increasing prominence of gray one activities, and if I can quote from your article, you call it a "ripe opportunity for international legal innovation." Why is international loss so important in confronting this type of problem and to solving this issue?

Richard Maass: Yeah.

Again, this ties right back into the interactions between the international norms and legal literature and the security studies literature.

The idea that, well, when we think about the way that international security functions, the categories that policymakers are using and scholars are using to understand what's going on are constituted through shared norms that are established over centuries of interactions and rhetoric and such.

And so, that implies right, that if you put effort into trying to change those norms, you can change the way that policymakers face incentives and the kinds of behaviors that you see in the system.

And so international law doesn't, you know, provide an automatic solution or anything that can magically solve these problems, but it does provide one arena where policymakers can put some focus and try to adjust the incentives that aggressors face.

And in particular, I see international law as being really useful as a focal point for actors to rally around in opposing these kinds of behavior.

So, as we'll get to later, I'm sure you know by clearly setting a standard of what constitutes gray one aggression, that can help to define situations that are illegitimate, you know, kinds of behavior that are illegitimate and situations that warrant a collective response, both within domestic publics and within international coalitions.

And that rallying effect can have actually a pretty big impact on the incentives that states face in the system.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Rich, thanks.

I really appreciated the focus on aggression as a concept in international law in this article because it strikes me that that really is a useful way of shifting to make some progress on these gray one activities that have consumed so much attention and generated so much concern in global security policy and discussions in recent years.

So you settle on a very sort of specific definition where you talk about aggression short of war.

And in doing that, the article talks about, and I'm looking at my notes here to make sure I'm quoting you accurately, the erosion of the legal line between war and peace, and that the way international law treats that line is increasingly inadequate because states have largely abandoned the practice of formally declaring war.

And so can you talk about a little bit in more detail —unpack for us— how international law typically has defined aggression, and why that is a more useful way of thinking about dealing with these gray one threats today?

Richard Maass: Yeah.

As I walked through in the article, there are basically two ways that people tend to think about the gray one in the existing literature.

One is as this realm between peace and war.

So I use these Venn diagrams, which obviously you can't see in the podcast format, but check out the article.

You can see them in there.

And so the first of these diagrams basically shows peace and war as these separate spheres and the gray one as this area in between.

And this is a common way to think about it: as a realm between peace and war.

But that kind of leads to more of a nebulous, you know it when you see it approach to defining cases of gray one conflict, right?

Something that doesn't really feel like peace, doesn't really feel like war, and it doesn't really shed that much light on how the gray one works or how to deter those kinds of activities in particular.

The other major way people focus on the gray one is as an overlapping area between peace and war.

So, this is kind of the hybrid warfare concept.

An area where war concepts should be applied to areas that we used to think of as peaceful, and the challenge with that one is that it really doubles down on the rigid binary distinction between war and peace.

It just kind of takes some of the peace stuff and puts it into the war category and says, we should use war concepts and methods to address this.

And that deepens the militarization of the foreign policy space, which others have drawn attention to as well.

And, you know, a lot of gray one activities involve non-armed means— things like disinformation campaigns, say, or cyber attacks— that there's some valid questions about whether it's worth really thinking of those in a military context or there are other ways to think about those challenges and other means to address them.

And so the way that I define the gray one is as aggression, short of war.

And so my Venn diagram basically has two circles— aggression and war— which overlap because of course some wars are aggressive wars.

Some wars may be defensive wars, you know, not aggressive wars, but then the gray one is the rest of that aggression circle, right?

The non-war part of the aggression category.

And that, I think is a really useful way to think about it because we do have a pretty clear understanding of what aggression is in international law; it's been defined.

There's a long history of states signing non-aggression pacts.

There's the League of Nations Covenant that pledged its members to respect and preserve against external aggression, the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members.

The UN charter echoed that language in a different form.

There's actually a very precise definition now stemming from a UN General Assembly resolution back in 1974, that then was basically taken and included in the International Criminal Courts Rome Statute, as updated by the 2010 Kampala Amendments.

And so that basically defines an act of aggression as the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the charter of the United Nations.

As I talk about in the article, it goes on to identify a specific crime of aggression as basically the planning and preparation and execution of that kind of activity, and it lists some examples, including things like invasions, military occupations, bombardments, blockades, and so on.

And, to be clear, I think that's a very good thing, right?

It's good to define what aggressive war is and to try to structure international law to prevent aggressive wars as much as possible because they're very destructive.

The challenge is that by defining an act of aggression specifically as a use of force, existing international law basically logically rules out the category of non-war forms of aggression.

And so this is kind of what helps constitute the gray one as this messy area that we don't really know what to do with, because we have a clear legal category for aggressive war, but we don't have any real clear legal category for these other kinds of things that nevertheless undercut states' territorial integrity, political independence, sovereignty and so on.

So basically the bottom line there conceptually is that defining aggression as a subset of war eliminates the logical possibility of aggression short of war.

And so we need to kind of take a step back and recognize there are forms of aggression that don't involve uses of military force, and to think about then how to define that category and build that into international law in a way that's useful.

Ryan Vest: That's really interesting, Rich.

As I was reading through this, one thing that really stuck out to me was this idea of strategic initiative that you talk about, where one nation is able to dictate the terms of conflict to others in the region.

Why is it so difficult for defenders to respond to gray one tactics within our existing legal and political frameworks?

Richard Maass: Yeah, strategic initiative plays a big role in the argument in the article because this is really what I see as constituting the main challenge that faces policymakers here.

If you're trying to deter aggressors from using gray one methods, then why is that such a big challenge?

And the reason really is that gray one activities put defenders on the back foot.

The idea of strategic initiative is all about freedom of movement, freedom of decision making between the aggressor and defender, which one has more freedom to maneuver, who is more constrained and reactionary and kind of forced to respond to what the other one is doing.

And so a key challenge of the gray one is that it basically lends the strategic initiative to the aggressors.

By pursuing activities that are widely agreed to not cross the threshold between war and peace, the aggressor leaves the decision to ultimately escalate into a war up to the defender.

And that decision of course comes with major costs and risks, and so defenders often feel like they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

They don't like the aggressive gray one activities.

They're suffering, but they also don't want to escalate into a major war.

And I argue that that dilemma arises because gray one aggression undercuts the traditional logic of what scholars call deterrence by punishment.

Basically the traditional approach to deterrence is that you try to persuade the adversary not to attack for fear of suffering a devastating retaliation.

If you can credibly establish your ability and your willingness to retaliate against me with enough force, I'll think twice before attacking you.

But it's worth noting that international norms play a major role here as well because both aggressors and defenders understand that initiating a war of aggression will mobilize publics to resist and rally partners abroad and everything.

And so it's costly to launch a war, and that armed attack standard in international law, therefore, is really useful.

The problem is that it still relies on the defender making that ultimate decision to escalate into war if you're dealing with gray one activities, right?

Gray one activities, again, by definition, are not involving crossing that threshold.

So it's the defender who has to decide, this is such a threat, we need to cross this threshold to retaliate.

And as a result, functionally, the defender often ends up kind of like the one stuck with the hot potato.

They might well decide the costs and risks of war aren't worth it, especially if it would be particularly hard to rally the public at home, say, to fight a war if they haven't suffered an armed attack, right?

Because that's where the normative focal point is.

So essentially international law is kind of playing a paradoxical dual role here.

It's helping to deter wars of aggression, but it's also helping to deter, perhaps, wars of retaliation, and creating this gray one where aggressors can thrive.

And so one way to understand the three hallmarks of the gray one, which I lay out in the article— unconventional means, ambiguous ways, limited ends— is that they're basically means ways and ends that under prevailing norms don't legitimize military retaliation.

And so they undercut that logic of deterrence by punishment by forcing the defender into that reactionary role, as you know, is this worth escalating or not?

And that leads to the alternative concept of deterrence by denial that the article focuses on.

I'm sure we'll talk about more.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: I want to get to that in just a second, but before we do that, can you give our readers a sense of where in the world, sometimes, has this been a strategic challenge?

Who has been forced into making the decision, or into that dilemma that you outlined for defenders, of deciding whether or not to escalate beyond the gray one in order to protect or defend their interests.

Can you give us a couple of examples of where you see this dilemma most acutely driving security dynamics in the world today?

Richard Maass: Yeah, once you start looking for examples, they end up popping up all over the place.

But from a US foreign policy context, say, from that perspective, you look at things like, say, the prominent example was, in 2014, Russia's annexation of Crimea— where Russia did not send military forces over the border like it did in 2022.

The full scale invasion of Ukraine was much more an outlier among recent security challenges.

In 2014, instead, they sent unmarked military personnel — proxy forces that seemed to be, or at least were claiming to be a local insurgency and uprising aimed to protect the rights of local civilians, and such.

And so, annexing Crimea through those more indirect means, rather than declaring war and initiating a conquest.

Or say, China's artificial island building campaign in the South China Sea in its use of maritime militias.

Again, not using marked military forces to launch a war of aggression, but instead engaging in physical changes in the environment and functional changes in behavioral patterns in the region that changed facts on the ground for its neighbors in the area.

Or say, other examples like in the Middle East, Iran's long-term use of proxy groups in Lebanon and Yemen and other places.

Again, not relying on a straightforward competition between one national military and another, but instead trying to pursue aggressive ends through the use of other groups.

Or say in 2016, the US experience with election interference in the US elections.

Again, disinformation, cyber attacks, all part of this category of things that states are engaging in routinely these days, but that don't cross that threshold into uses of armed force.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So we started to get into this a little bit a moment ago in the podcast, but I really want to turn now to unpacking your proposed

strategy that you lay out in the article: this idea of legal deterrence by denial.

And so I wanted to ask you, you know, you have three steps in the proposed

strategy: defining gray one aggression in law, criminalizing the tactics used, and attributing attribution and enforcement.

And I wondered particularly if we could start with that first step and talk about why is that first step so important, and how does this really address the central dilemma of strategic initiative that we've been discussing?

Richard Maass: The first step there of clearly defining a concept of gray zone aggression in international law really builds on that recognition of the role international law plays —that normative focal point role.

Right now we have a very clear line between peace and war, which is useful for the purpose of trying to deter aggressive wars, and so clearly defining a concept of gray one aggression would fulfill a kind of similar role in unambiguously de-legitimizing gray one activities.

Again, one of the strategic benefits that aggressors see in the gray one is how ambiguous those methods are, and that they can kind of avoid attribution, they can engage in aggressive behaviors in ways that don't clearly legitimize retaliation against them in the same way that an armed attack would.

And so offering a clear definition would de-legitimize those activities unambiguously.

It would offer a focal point for various domestic actors, international actors, to rally around opposing those activities.

That clear definition could take a variety of forms.

I think the specifics of it are kind of a second question after just the need to have a clear standard.

In the article, the one that I see that has the most promising candidate builds directly on that existing UN/international criminal court definition of aggression.

That would be basically defining an act of gray one aggression using language directly building on those previous definitions of aggression— which as I mentioned, basically frame it as a subset of war — to define an act of gray one aggression as the use of unarmed means against a state or by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state, conceiving the crime of gray one aggression in similar terms, and laying out examples including election interference, disinformation, cyber attacks, sabotage, weaponizing migration, fomenting insurrection, things like this.

One of the big advantages of that kind of approach is that it would take advantage of what scholars have called grafting in international norms— basically building a new norm on the back of an existing, accepted norm to help solidify its legitimacy.

So, if you think about how the mine ban treaty built on the back of the chemical weapons ban treaty, and that in turn had built on the back of the biological weapons ban treaty, in each successive step basically, you know, activists and policymakers said, "We all agreed this thing should be banned.

This other thing is just like that thing, so it should also be banned." And so that was a way to rally support for the new norm.

So in this way, right, if we all recognize that aggressive wars are things that should be prohibited, if gray one aggression basically assaults the same core principles of international sovereignty as aggressive war, then that's a way to build on that prior legitimacy and establish a new norm.

It also has the benefit of the fact that international law does clearly prohibit aggression.

So, if again, one of the strategic benefits of the gray one is the ambiguity of it all, establishing a clear legal concept of gray one aggression would clearly imply its prohibition and overtly prohibit it as well.

And another benefit of building off of that existing definition is that the UN and ICC's definition is overtly rooted in principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence.

And so building on that definition would further reinforce those central principles, which is really the whole point of deterring gray one aggression in the first place, right?

We want to protect those things.

And so, by building on that definition, again, it helps to lock in those principles at the core of it.

Ryan Vest: Building on that foundation, I look at your second and your third steps of criminalizing the tactics used and improving attribution and enforcement.

And these both strike me as very difficult things for us to do in the international arena.

Looking ahead at this, how can we use existing tools, existing legal structures, and institutional reforms to enforce, or to at least make it harder for states to employ gray one tactics?

Richard Maass: Yeah, it's one thing to say something should be prohibited, right?

It's another whole can of worms to say, okay, how do we actually try to disincentivize this kind of behavior?

And so, the second and third steps in this legal deterrence by denial strategy focus on criminalizing the behaviors involved in gray one aggression and increasing attribution of, you know, who's responsible for folks who are engaging in those behaviors.

And these are certainly challenging things to do, but I think there's a lot of room for international legal activity to help to promote those kinds of cooperation internationally.

So the logic behind those steps essentially is, again, that deterrence by denial logic— trying to raise the upfront costs of gray one aggression in order to more meaningfully deter aggressors from choosing that path in the first place — and so there's a lot of analogies here to the way that security scholars think about trying to deter a territorial conquest or faits accomplis, say.

If a threat of post hoc punishment wouldn't be enough, maybe, it would be more effective to bolster on the ground defenses or fortifications, or deploy allied forces in a way that meaningfully contributes to local defense rather than just serving as a tripwire, threatening a later intervention, things like this.

So legal deterrence by denial kind of tries to take that same mentality and apply it in the international legal space.

So when it comes to gray one activities, of course, the diversity of forms that those activities take make a lot of that challenging, but it also means that a lot of steps might be useful.

So say: working to develop shared standards in cybersecurity or to combat disinformation; taking criminal justice approaches toward counter-terrorism and trying to turn those towards some of the specific gray one activities— criminalizing the activities that would be going on on the ground in those contexts; efforts to increase coordination and legal prosecution across international borders, say, in international criminal law, most of the focus has been on the very worst high level crimes— things like genocide and war crimes — and there, I think, is a lot of opportunity to try to develop lower levels of international crimes that might be useful here that cut at core principles of state sovereignty, and to use that as a foundation to identify things as international crimes and to try to coordinate international law enforcement to deal with those; things like facilitating intelligence sharing through international partnerships, right?

We have several major international intelligence sharing conglomerates that exist today within alliances and across alliances, and that there are challenges that go along with that, right?

But the greater role that international organizations— they can play, in facilitating intelligence sharing — that should facilitate then the ability of states to address gray one activities as they're occurring, and to know about them soon enough to really make a difference on the ground upfront.

And similarly, efforts to streamline law enforcement and coordination across international agencies, say including gray one activities and extradition treaties and such, right?

There's no way to really remove all the challenges that are involved in the gray one.

Say, one of the other things that I talked about in the article is how aggressors often will pursue peripheral interests because that means that the defender is less likely to be willing to risk the cost of war to respond.

And you can't just get rid of peripheral interests, but every little bit that international law can do to help chip away at the likelihood of getting away with gray one activities in the moment, right, for the actual agents on the ground, can help to deter those kinds of behaviors.

As I write in the article, futility can be an even more powerful deterrent than expense in this context, right?

If aggressors don't think that just functionally they'll be able to accomplish the things that they would like to do, they're less likely to pursue those activities.

And especially in the gray one where threats of post hoc retaliation are likely to be seen as not credible, trying to bolster that futility upfront offers a better path to deterrence.

Ryan Vest: Can I follow up on that just a little bit?

I'm really curious.

You know, you've used examples of Russia and China as countries that use some of these gray one tactics and I think back.

And, you know, looking at your second and third steps, talking about things like improving attribution and enforcement, with Russia, they deny everything no matter what they do.

And as I'm thinking back along again with, for instance, China— thinking back to the 2016 international court case between the Philippines and China— where China just shrugged and said, "Well, we're not gonna recognize that anyway." What avenues do we actually have available to us as a nation to confront these larger countries— countries with a veto on the UN Security Council under international legal norms — what do we have available to us to confront and to deter these types of activities?

Richard Maass: Well, your question really gets at the core dynamic of how international law works in this space, which is, international law is not something external or natural or automatic that just kind of constrains states from the outside.

It's much better understood, I think, as a currency or a technology or a language that states develop and use.

And so, any enforcement of existing international legal principles or any creation of new international legal principles relies completely on the investment of states and non-state actors as well in those processes.

So, say an example like in 2016, the court case between China and the Philippines, you know, that court ruling itself, the arbitration ruling can't just automatically force China to say, "Okay, we're gonna recognize what you say and abandon our position." What it does is provide a focal point for others to assess the legitimacy of what China's doing there.

So, by seeing the decision of the arbitrator in that case, others can look at that and say, "Okay, maybe we were skeptical before, but now we have a pretty solid legal basis for saying what you're doing is wrong and should be opposed." That doesn't guarantee that it would be opposed or that states would undertake particularly costly measures to oppose it, but it does help to rally opponents and help to delegitimize the position that China's taking.

And so, same thing applies to any given actor in a gray one context.

The function of international law would not be to put a physical wall in front of states and prevent them from pursuing these kinds of things, but to provide as much diplomatic and rhetorical ammunition, normative ammunition for domestic opponents and international opponents, to rally opposition in a meaningful way.

And instrumentally, again, thinking back to the second and third parts

of the strategy there: to try to get all of those things operating as soon as possible at the lowest levels.

So, say agents on the ground are more likely to be arrested in the first place rather than be able to carry out the full strategy, and then the state be faced with the prospect of post hoc retaliation, which again, you know, may or may not be a credible threat.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Let me follow up on that, because I think this really does get to the crux of some of the skepticism about the use of international legal tools, right?

So Ryan raised this issue that international law is either too weak or too easily politicized by powerful actors in the system to be effective in confronting these challenges.

But I wanted to actually turn to the other side of that equation— which is the actors that might be trying to use these tools to solve the problems, the strategic initiative that you outlined— and just ask you about, you know, in the past, the United States or other actors have sometimes expressed some concern that they would lose necessary strategic flexibility by tying hands through various international legal or organizational commitments.

And so, you know, I wanted to ask you about basically the distributional consequences of this legal innovation that you're proposing.

And I can see that it might have some powerful objections from actors like China, Russia, some other folks that you've mentioned in the course of this conversation.

But how do you assess the willingness of the United States, the United States' allies and partners, or even, you know, a wide range of actors in the global south to engage in this kind of legal innovation?

How do you think they will weigh the costs and benefits of this kind of framework?

Richard Maass: There's a lot for any given state to weigh when it comes to creating new elements of law, because law is meant to be a constraint; that's its purpose.

So, even if it relies on enforcement that is fundamentally political, and even if it's created through a political process, the legitimizing of certain behaviors and de-legitimizing of others has consequences that states are going to be thinking about.

And so, the states that see a lot of utility in gray one aggression at the moment, of course, are less likely to support international legal innovations in this way.

But that's not to say that they have no reason to value restraints on gray one aggression, or that they might not see greater utility in that space in the future.

So, for example, we've talked about China and Russia as states that use gray one activities.

Both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have expressed their fear at various points over potential outside interference in their own domestic politics.

That might spark their removal from power in a color revolution or this sort of thing, right?

They're, depending on who you read, they're either concerned or perhaps petrified at times of this as a threat.

And so in that context, right, they have a lot to gain from preventing international legal efforts to prevent other countries from engaging in gray one aggression toward them.

The US as mentioned, has suffered its own election interference— certainly has something to gain there.

And preferences can change over time as well.

You know, one analogy that we often forget about is when it comes to territorial conquest— an area that I've worked on in a lot of my previous research — international law used to allow for territorial conquest as spoils of war until about a hundred years ago.

And there was a major movement and lots of activists in lots of countries.

The US prominently got on board with this and helped to embed that norm in the League of Nations and then in the UN Charter, but before the early 20th century, conquest was a pretty routine thing that was legal in a lot of contexts.

And views on that changed.

And so that's something where, you know, again, if states decide they want to really try to reinforce those core principles of statehood sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, and they recognize gray one activities as perhaps not the most deadly or destructive threat to those principles, but as arguably the most prevalent, and in the current context, as a problem worth addressing, then maybe they don't go all the way to ban categorically, you know, these kinds of behaviors if they still see strategic utility in engaging in them.

But maybe there's a cracked door open for them to engage in banning certain kinds of behavior or in recognizing a category, even if there's still contestation over exactly what behaviors fall into that category, this sort of thing.

It's often the way that international norms and law change through contestation, through iterative cycles of contestation rather than, you know, a big sea change all at once.

Ryan Vest: So what happens if we aren't able to change?

If we don't adapt?

If the international community fails to close some of these loopholes and gaps that have made gray one tactics so effective, what do you see as the long-term risks for the global order or for US global strategy?

Richard Maass: Well, the long and the short of it is that if the international community fails to address these challenges, then we'll see continued instability with a greater potential for escalation into war.

And one of the risks of the gray one is not just that a given state will have its own sovereignty eroded through non-armed aggression means, but that those situations are particularly likely to escalate into war, and especially if we think that the international system perhaps has done a relatively good job in lowering states' incentives to engage in aggressive war.

Again, you know, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 aside, full-on conquest attempts with armies crossing borders are relatively rare in the modern world.

And there's lots of reasons for that, but one of the kinds of situations that policymakers worry about a lot and what keeps them up at night is not that you'll have a massive army on the border that's all going to cross at once, but that you'll get an escalation that plays out step by step.

It starts out as something small and it brings in higher and higher levels of conflict, more and more actors, and becomes something like a World War, say.

These are the kinds of scenarios that policymakers worry about in the South China Sea and in Taiwan and elsewhere.

It's often less one massive war starting all at once and more, this way, that way, kind of tit-for-tat retaliations as things escalate.

So, gray one activities open the door to a lot of that, right?

They threaten states' core principles, they pose national security risks.

And so they compel policymakers to respond, but they don't offer that clear legal line yet, at least, to deter aggressors from engaging in them.

And so they do offer one of the most dangerous pathways into broader war, even if it starts out at lower levels.

And so failing to address that challenge again, you know, keeps that door open, and keeps the system a little bit less stable than it might otherwise be — keeps the system from making further progress toward greater stability in that regard.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: On that uplifting note— Rich, before we close, actually, let me ask you if there's anything that you encountered in writing the article that we haven't talked about or haven't surfaced in this conversation today that you think is particularly important, either about the strategy itself or the geopolitical environment that you're proposing it in, either the opportunities or challenges.

Is there anything we've missed that you want to add before we wrap up today?

Richard Maass: Thanks.

No, I would just underscore, I think, that this article is a good example of the value of interdisciplinary research.

I think there's a lot more for scholars in any field to learn from crossing self-imposed disciplinary boundaries and kind of smashing two literatures together and thinking about how they interact, how one might shed light on fundamental elements of the other that often go overlooked, and how they might open the door to creative solutions to persisting problems.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Well, we are big fans of the interdisciplinary approach and its value at the Texas National Security Review, and I think your article is honestly a great example of that for us.

It takes two disciplines or two parts of the field that don't often talk to each other and puts them together in a really innovative way to address, really one of the most vexing, difficult, intractable problems, as I see it, of the global security environment for the past couple of decades.

So we're thrilled to have the article out in the Texas National Security Review, and especially delighted to have you come on the podcast and talk with us on "Horns of a Dilemma" today.

So thanks so much for joining us.

We really appreciate it.

Richard Maass: Thanks for having me.

It's been a pleasure.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Thanks for joining us on "Horns of a Dilemma," the podcast of the Texas National Security Review.

Our guest today has been Dr.

Richard Maass, author of "Legal Deterrence

by Denial: Strategic Initiative and International Law in the Gray Zone," which as always can be accessed for free on our website, TNSR.org.

If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen.

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You can find more of our work at TNSR.org.

Today's episode was produced by TNSR digital and technical manager, Jordan Morning, and made possible by The University of Texas System.

This is Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Ryan Vest.

Thanks again for listening.