The Danger of "Escalation"

By Alejandro

Escalation.

The media warns about it, politicians dread it, and intellectuals fear it. Commentators, whenever they talk about the two major wars of today, have been repeating that nagging word as an alert and treating it like a taboo that shouldn’t be explained or critically thought about.

In the common lexicon, it’s presented as a sheer negative, and that whoever continues to “escalate” deserves reprobation. But what are the roots on which an idea such as escalation relies? Is it a proper way of conceiving foreign policy matters?

Let’s observe a couple of examples in today’s political landscape to detect the similarities in the use of such a word.