There are humans, existing in a complex society. All meaning is negotiated all the time. All the expectations of behaviour from which your confidant hueristic analysis springs are at all times liable to be contradicted. For instance, few would have thought that the "powers that be" would permit massive conventional war in Europe at this late date.

There is no platonic, eternal, divine legal system in which we encode what is and isn't actually war or which escalations are permissible in discrete scenarios.