Throughout the war in Ukraine, Western governments have repeatedly withheld or delayed the transfer of advanced weapons systems - long-range missiles, main battle tanks, F-16 fighters, and ATACMS - citing fears that their provision would provoke Russian escalation or draw NATO directly into the conflict. A new report from the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) argues that this pattern of self-deterrence mirrors the disastrous Non-Intervention Agreement of the Spanish Civil War.
Defense scholar Iskander Rehman writes that the 1936 agreement, signed by 27 nations including those most actively violating it, was "widely recognized as an elaborate diplomatic fiction" from the start. Within weeks, Mussolini had dispatched 90 aircraft, Germany activated the Condor Legion, and the Soviet Union began shipping tanks and military advisors - all while their representatives sat in London adjudicating complaints, "Hvylya" reports, citing the study.
The parallel to the Ukraine conflict is striking. In several cases, weapons eventually deemed acceptable were transferred without triggering the feared escalation - after being withheld for months or years. The delays exacted a measurable military price, most acutely during 2022-23, when Ukrainian forces lacking sufficient armor and air defense suffered attritional losses that earlier provision might have mitigated.
Rehman argues that Western deterrence logic, "by treating each incremental capability as a potential tripwire, has inadvertently ceded to its adversaries a form of escalation dominance." Moscow and Pyongyang have been free to increase their aggression, confident that self-imposed Western restraint would reliably slow the replenishment of Ukrainian combat power.
The study notes that interwar decision-makers in London and Paris clung to non-intervention not out of naivety but out of despondent fatalism. They remained convinced that acknowledging the intervention openly would force a choice between acquiescence and confrontation - a choice for which neither democracy felt militarily prepared. The HCSS report argues that escalation dominance, whether in the 1930s or today, "accrues to those willing to act, not to those paralyzed by the fear of acting."
"Hvylya" earlier reported on how every missile fired in one theater weakens deterrence in another - and how Beijing tracks this calculus closely.