Long before “gray-zone warfare” became a strategic buzzword, great powers were already fighting for advantage without going to war. Through three gripping episodes of twentieth-century naval intervention, Short of War reveals how Britain and the United States used sea power, neutrality, and calculated risk to shape conflicts—and what those experiences can teach us about navigating today’s increasingly dangerous space between peace and war.
Neutrality has rarely meant staying out of war. Instead, it has often allowed nations to shape conflicts without becoming formal belligerents.
In Short of War, author Christian Richer argues that neutrality has frequently been an active instrument of great power strategy, allowing states to influence conflicts, protect national interests, and shape political outcomes without officially going to war. Long before the term "gray zone" entered today's strategic vocabulary, Britain and the United States employed conventional naval power, diplomacy, and carefully calibrated intervention to compete in the contested space between peace and war.
Through three twentieth-century case studies—the British response to the Spanish Civil War, the United States' expanding role in the Battle of the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor, and U.S. intervention during the Iran-Iraq Tanker War—Richer demonstrates how naval forces enabled governments to manage escalation, secure maritime commerce, reassure allies, and influence the course of wars while maintaining claims of neutrality. These interventions were neither passive nor accidental. Each required measured—and often risky—uses of conventional naval power to advance national objectives while avoiding escalation into general war.
Rather than treating gray-zone competition as a uniquely twenty-first-century challenge, Richer places today's strategic debates within a longer modern historical tradition. By examining the interaction of foreign policy, military strategy, diplomacy, and maritime power, he reveals enduring patterns in how great powers compete below the threshold of war and why conventional naval forces remain indispensable instruments of statecraft.
As policymakers confront renewed great power competition, maritime coercion, and conflicts that resist traditional definitions of war and peace, Short of War provides an essential historical framework for understanding the strategic choices available to nations seeking to influence events without triggering full-scale war. Richer demonstrates that the contested space between peace and war is not an exception to history—it has long been one of its defining arenas.
