It Starts With a Strike… Then a Storm

A missile hits a convoy outside Damascus. Hours later, air defence systems light up over Tel Aviv. In response, rockets are fired from southern Lebanon. The next day, warships reposition in the Gulf, and oil prices surge. Each move framed as necessary. Each retaliation justified by the last.

It’s a familiar choreography—an improvised dance of fire and fear that plays out, almost ritualistically, across news headlines and diplomatic briefings. But behind the headlines, behind the solemn condemnations and veiled threats, lies something deeper and more insidious: a structural design problem.

What we are witnessing—whether in Gaza, in Ukraine, across the Red Sea, or along the Taiwan Strait—is not random chaos. These aren’t simply the tragic products of history or ideology or even personality. They are symptoms of systems designed without brakes.

Escalation doesn’t just happen. It unfolds predictably, almost mechanically, according to a logic embedded in modern political institutions, defence strategies, and media narratives. A drone strike is never just a drone strike; it’s a trigger. A red line, once crossed, rarely disappears—it moves, then multiplies. And when escalation becomes the default operating mode, peace becomes an afterthought, a fragile pause between flare-ups.

Yet in most nations, there are vast bureaucracies dedicated to preparing for conflict—defence departments, intelligence agencies, military contractors, cybersecurity divisions. Where, then, are the departments for peace? Where are the professionals trained not only to respond after war begins but to intervene before it does?

What if peace weren’t just a diplomatic talking point, but a national system—equally funded, staffed, and institutionalised as defence? What if governments had standing peace infrastructure the way they have war cabinets?

This article asks a deceptively simple question: What would it look like to design escalation out of the system? And what would it take for Australia—and the world—to reimagine peace not as a utopian hope, but as a practical, structural commitment?

Because if conflict is architectural, so too is peace. The difference is, one we’ve been building for centuries. The other we’ve barely begun.

Escalation Isn’t Emotional—It’s Engineered

When violence erupts between nations or factions, we often reach for psychological explanations. Leaders are angry. Populations are grieving. Tempers flare. But underneath the emotion lies machinery—a pattern of escalation that behaves less like a spontaneous reaction and more like a pre-set algorithm.

At its core, escalation is a process of progressive intensification. It begins with a provocation—real or perceived—and builds through retaliatory responses, each justified by the last. What begins as a limited strike expands in scope, drawing in new actors, heightening rhetoric, and narrowing diplomatic off-ramps. Eventually, the logic of de-escalation is replaced by the logic of endurance: Who will blink first? Who will strike harder?

Recent conflicts illustrate this all too well. In the occupied Palestinian territories and surrounding states, one rocket launch or targeted assassination is enough to unleash days—or weeks—of warfare. The actors involved are not just state militaries but also militias, media outlets, and algorithms that determine what stories are amplified and when. In Ukraine, what began as political friction over territorial influence spiralled into Europe’s most devastating land war in decades, with drone technologies, cyberattacks, and shifting red lines raising the threshold for resolution at every stage.

This is not new. In fact, escalation follows patterns well understood by conflict theorists. The “tit-for-tat” cycle, often discussed in game theory, posits that reciprocal punishment tends to entrench hostility. What’s less discussed is how systems—bureaucratic, technological, ideological—make these cycles harder to break. Once retaliation becomes a political necessity, options narrow. If one side pauses, they risk looking weak. If they don’t, the fire spreads.

Escalation also benefits from momentum. It rides the energy of public outrage, the rally-around-the-flag effect, the political utility of distraction. Governments may not consciously seek escalation, but once inside the spiral, few know how to get out—and fewer are rewarded for trying.

And in this engineered process, peace is rarely invited into the room. There is no protocol for pause. No institutional equivalent of a firebreak. The decisions that drive conflict forward are often made by defence officials, national security advisers, and military planners—but where is the structural presence of those trained to interrupt? To advise against the next move rather than prepare for it?

When escalation is embedded into how states think, plan, and fund their responses to crisis, de-escalation must also be embedded. Without dedicated peace infrastructure—systems designed not to manage war but to prevent it—our responses will always arrive too late.

The Security Dilemma: When Defence Looks Like Offence

At the heart of many modern conflicts lies a paradox. One nation strengthens its defences—not to threaten, but to deter. Another watches closely, perceives that very build-up as aggressive, and responds in kind. Before long, both sides are locked in a spiral neither intended, each insisting the other started it.

This is the security dilemma, a concept long studied in international relations. It describes a situation in which efforts by one state to increase its security decrease the security of others. The problem isn’t necessarily intent—it’s perception. And perception, especially in high-stakes geopolitics, often outpaces reality.

We’ve seen this play out starkly in recent years.

Take NATO’s eastward expansion. For many Eastern European nations, joining NATO was a protective move—an insurance policy against future coercion. For Russia, it was seen as encroachment, a creeping threat toward its borders. Each step in this long-standing friction deepened mistrust. Eventually, what might have been managed diplomatically collapsed into open war in Ukraine.

Or consider Iran’s regional strategy. From Tehran’s perspective, supporting proxy forces across Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria is a rational response to decades of sanctions, foreign interventions, and military threats. But for Israel and the United States, those same forces—Hezbollah, militia groups, weapons shipments—are seen as existential threats that must be preemptively contained. The result? A region where nearly every act of defence is read as provocation, and the space for trust erodes with each missile test and retaliatory strike.

The security dilemma is made worse by modern technology. Drones can strike without warning. Cyberattacks blur the line between sabotage and espionage. Hypersonic missiles reduce reaction time to minutes. In this environment, even routine military exercises can trigger panic. The world becomes a tripwire, primed for miscalculation.

And unlike during the Cold War, today’s dilemmas are less contained by clear blocs or formal treaties. Instead, they’re layered—state actors, non-state proxies, multinational alliances, private contractors, and AI-powered surveillance systems all operating at once. The sheer complexity makes de-escalation harder to coordinate, and more vulnerable to cascading effects.

But the deeper issue is institutional. Our governments are structured to respond to threat—but not to question whether a threat is truly existential, or whether it’s the result of a misread signal. There are ministries for defence, task forces for counterterrorism, agencies for intelligence-gathering. But few nations invest in structured uncertainty analysis—the civic skill of asking, what if this move isn’t hostile? What if we’re misinterpreting stability for aggression?

The security dilemma teaches us that peace doesn’t come from having more weapons or better alliances. It comes from changing the logic of engagement—building systems that prioritise verification, restraint, and dialogue before action.

And that requires not just diplomatic good will, but structural redesign.

The Psychology of the Spiral

We often think of international conflict as a matter of strategy or statecraft—of leaders weighing risks and making rational calculations. But underneath the geopolitics lies a deeper current: human psychology. The way individuals, institutions, and entire nations respond to fear, uncertainty, and threat has more to do with biology and belief than we might like to admit.

At the individual level, escalation is hardwired. The human brain evolved to respond quickly to danger. In the presence of threat, the amygdala lights up, priming us to fight, flee, or freeze. Rational processing narrows. Time compresses. We revert to instinct. And when that instinct governs policy, the result is action without reflection—retaliation as reflex.

This response isn’t confined to individuals. Groups experience it too. Social psychologists call it groupthink—a phenomenon where cohesion and conformity override critical thinking. In moments of crisis, dissent becomes dangerous. Leaders surround themselves with loyalists. Intelligence is filtered to support pre-existing narratives. Risks are downplayed; certainty becomes a weapon.

Add to this the psychological need for control. When nations feel vulnerable—militarily, economically, or morally—they often seek to restore a sense of agency through decisive action. Bombing a weapons depot, deploying troops, issuing ultimatums: these become ways of asserting order in a chaotic world. The language of strength replaces the practice of understanding.

National identity plays its part too. In moments of perceived humiliation or loss, collective narratives shift. “We must defend ourselves.” “They only understand force.” “If we don’t act now, we’ll be seen as weak.” These sentiments are politically powerful. They rally support, silence critics, and justify extraordinary measures.

Leaders, meanwhile, are trapped in performance. Whether facing election cycles or managing fragile coalitions, they are under constant pressure to appear decisive. In such environments, restraint is easily spun as weakness, and caution is politically risky. Even when a leader suspects that escalation is a trap, the cost of stepping back may be greater than the cost of stepping in.

This psychological spiral is not a flaw in diplomacy—it is diplomacy, as currently practiced. Decisions are made under duress, framed in adversarial terms, and amplified by a media ecosystem that rewards drama over depth. What makes the spiral dangerous is not that it happens, but that we lack the structural tools to interrupt it.

What if, instead of relying on individual leaders to resist these pressures, we built institutions designed to absorb and diffuse them? Peace systems could offer pre-crisis counselling to decision-makers, manage national dialogues during high-tension moments, and provide trusted, nonpartisan assessments of threat perception. In the same way that fire services are trained to remain calm in the face of smoke, peace professionals could be trained to navigate the emotional turbulence of political panic.

Because until we acknowledge the psychology behind escalation, we will continue to mistake fear for fact, and retaliation for reason.

Why Peace Struggles to Compete

In nearly every nation on Earth, war has a budget line. It has departments, doctrines, procurement systems, command chains, and contingency plans. In many countries, it also has monuments, public holidays, and vast archives of cultural myth. Peace, by contrast, is typically relegated to aspiration—something spoken about in speeches, celebrated when it happens, and forgotten when it doesn’t.

This is not an accident. Peace struggles to compete because it lacks the institutional muscle that war has built over centuries. There is no standing army of de-escalators, no fleet of peace practitioners deployed to looming flashpoints. There are no televised “peace exercises” or national drills for dialogue under pressure. And unlike the defence sector, peace has no billion-dollar contractors lobbying for investment.

Instead, peace work is too often scattered across non-government organisations, faith groups, and under-resourced community initiatives. When tensions rise, these groups are rarely at the table. Governments turn to military advisers, intelligence agencies, and foreign policy hardliners. The result is a systemic imbalance: war is always ready; peace is always improvising.

The funding gap reflects this imbalance starkly. Globally, military expenditure surpassed $2.2 trillion in 2023. Meanwhile, the total annual funding for peacebuilding—across the entire UN system, including mediation and conflict prevention—amounts to less than 0.5% of that figure. Even within Australia, defence spending hovers above $50 billion annually, while peace and conflict resolution programs are fragmented across departments or pushed into the realm of international aid.

The political calculus is also against peace. Defence industries create jobs. Military spending stimulates regional economies. Politicians can campaign on security. But peace is slower, more abstract. It doesn’t offer immediate outcomes. It can’t be photographed standing next to a tank. Its success is measured in what doesn’t happen: the war that didn’t break out, the crisis that quietly de-escalated.

There’s also a visibility problem. When peace efforts succeed, they’re often invisible—nothing happened, and that’s the point. But when they fail, they’re easily scapegoated as naïve or ineffective. War, by contrast, is highly visible. It commands attention. It signals action. And in an age of political performance, visibility often trumps value.

This institutional bias leaves nations ill-prepared. Without standing peace infrastructure—skilled personnel, cross-agency coordination, contingency frameworks—responses to conflict default to what is already built and ready: military options. And once the logic of violence takes hold, alternatives fade from view.

But this isn’t just a policy failure. It’s a design flaw. Peace isn’t weak or ineffective—it’s structurally unsupported.

To change this, peace must be given equal footing. That means dedicated ministries or departments for peace, embedded in national cabinets. It means stable funding, not project grants. It means national peace strategies linked to education, climate adaptation, foreign affairs, and social cohesion. And it means recognising peace not as a niche or moral concern, but as a core pillar of national resilience.

Until then, peace will continue to arrive late—called in after the damage is done, when what’s needed most is for it to be there first.

Interrupting the Spiral: What Structural Peace Could Look Like

If war is engineered, then peace must be too.

The idea of “peace infrastructure” may sound abstract, but in practice it means building the civic and institutional muscle to catch conflicts before they ignite. Not through last-minute negotiations or symbolic summits, but through everyday systems—just as we invest in fire prevention, public health, or natural disaster response. Escalation is predictable. So is the lack of preparation to stop it.

What might a functional peace system look like?

First, a Ministry or Department of Peace—fully embedded in government, with a mandate as strong as defence or foreign affairs. This department wouldn’t just issue hopeful statements. It would be staffed by experts in conflict transformation, cultural diplomacy, negotiation, trauma-informed practice, and systems thinking. Its job: to track emerging tensions, advise policy across all portfolios, and coordinate national and international de-escalation efforts.

Second, a Civilian Peace Corps, trained to operate across contexts—locally and globally. These professionals would work on the ground during early warning phases of unrest, whether that be interethnic tension, polarisation in democratic systems, or resource disputes. Just as Australia sends emergency responders to floods or fires, peaceworkers could be dispatched to volatile regions before violence takes hold.

Third, an Early Warning and Escalation Risk Monitoring System, integrating intelligence, climate stress indicators, media monitoring, and community reporting. Think of it as a “peace bureau of meteorology”—scanning for signs that pressure is building. Similar models exist in parts of Africa under regional peace and security architectures, but they remain under-resourced and largely siloed from global diplomacy.

Fourth, national escalation scenario planning, baked into defence and foreign policy—not just simulations of war, but simulations of how to prevent it. That means role-playing restraint, not just retaliation. It means involving diplomats, civil society, and media in readiness planning. Peace becomes a learned behaviour, not an improvised hope.

Some of this already exists—just not in one place. Costa Rica famously abolished its military in 1948 and redirected funding to education and social development. South Africa’s Peace Secretariat in the early 1990s coordinated local peace committees that prevented national implosion during a fragile democratic transition. In parts of Scandinavia, whole-of-society resilience planning includes social cohesion and civic trust as security priorities. But these remain the exception, not the norm.

In Australia, peacebuilding tends to sit in the margins—funded through aid, carried by NGOs, or attached to foreign diplomacy. But there’s no domestic strategy for national cohesion in the face of ideological division, no crisis unit designed to prevent political escalation, no coordinated response for hate-based violence or misinformation-driven unrest. And as the world grows more multipolar and climate-stressed, the risks multiply—internally and externally.

By institutionalising peace, we don’t eliminate conflict. But we create civic reflexes for how to respond without fire. We create the conditions in which pause becomes possible, and listening becomes policy.

It’s not naïve to prepare for peace. It’s naïve not to.

Australia’s Opportunity in a Fragmenting World

Australia sits at a strategic crossroads—geographically, diplomatically, and ideologically. While we are buffered by oceans and free from land borders, we are not insulated from the gravitational pull of global conflict. Our alliances, trade networks, and multicultural society connect us to every major fault line: the Indo-Pacific tensions, Middle East instability, cyber warfare, and the humanitarian costs of displacement and climate collapse.

In this complexity lies an opportunity.

Australia has long seen itself as a middle power—small enough to be non-threatening, yet influential enough to lead through example. In the past, this has meant championing multilateralism, supporting the UN, and punching above our weight in regional diplomacy. But in a world increasingly defined by rivalry and reaction, that role is eroding. The danger is not just military entanglement, but moral drift—where decisions are driven more by alliance inertia than independent foresight.

This is where Australia could choose differently.

Imagine a foreign policy where escalation management is embedded, not outsourced. Where we invest as much in preventing war as we do in preparing for it. Where we develop a peace strategy not just for conflict zones overseas, but for our own region, and even within our own borders.

We already have tools. Our peacekeeping history is respected. Our Pacific neighbours trust us—when we listen. Our multicultural society gives us lived experience in cultural bridging. Our education systems produce experts in psychology, diplomacy, anthropology, and community resilience. What’s missing is the structural commitment: the explicit policy and public investment that says peace is our business, too.

A Ministry for Peace in Australia wouldn’t just be symbolic. It could coordinate de-escalation training for diplomats and military personnel. It could develop whole-of-government frameworks to address rising social polarisation. It could partner with Pacific nations to build a regional peace platform—an Asia-Pacific council for conflict resolution, climate adaptation, and civil dialogue.

Such a move would not make us neutral. It would make us necessary.

In an era where many nations are doubling down on militarisation, Australia could offer something else: leadership through restraint. Not retreat, but redesign. Not disengagement, but re-engagement on new terms—where diplomacy isn’t just what happens before the shooting starts, but what prevents it from ever starting.

The path to that leadership doesn’t require abandoning alliances or pretending violence doesn’t exist. It requires balance. It requires vision. And most of all, it requires choosing peace not just when it’s convenient, but when it matters most.

Australia has a window. Not just to protect its own interests—but to offer a model for others who are tired of choosing between silence and sabres.

Design Determines Destiny

Every time a conflict spirals out of control, we are told it was inevitable. That tensions were ancient. That provocations were too great. That violence was the only language left to speak.

But inevitability is a story we tell when systems fail.

Escalation is not fate—it’s design. It unfolds along tracks laid down by generations of decisions: who holds power, how information flows, what gets funded, and which voices are trusted when the stakes rise. When we build societies to prepare for war, they do. When we fail to build for peace, peace does not come.

To interrupt the spiral, we must start not with blame, but with architecture.

This means recognising that peace is not the opposite of conflict—it is the management of conflict without violence. It is infrastructure: policies, processes, institutions, relationships. It’s as technical as it is ethical. And it can be built.

We already understand how to fund defence. We know how to simulate conflict. We know how to create rapid response systems and long-term strategic planning. All that is missing is the political will—and public demand—to apply that knowledge to peace.

Imagine a world where every major government had a Department of Peace alongside its Defence Ministry. Where national budgets included peace resilience metrics. Where every international summit had a standing de-escalation council. Where young leaders trained in mediation the way cadets train for war.

We are not there. But we could be.

Australia, with its unique positioning, its cultural pluralism, and its democratic stability, is well placed to lead this shift. A Ministry for Peace here would not just serve national interests—it would signal to the world that peace is not a luxury or a dream. It is public infrastructure. And it is possible.

In the end, systems shape stories. If we build governments that only respond with force, we will keep telling stories of justified violence. But if we build governments designed to listen, to pause, to imagine other outcomes—we might finally change the script.

Escalation is easy. Peace is engineered. The choice is ours to design.