When a commitment is challenged, a state might choose to back down rather than follow through on a promise to go to war. This prospect makes the commitment not credible. One way to solve this problem is to remove choice from the committing state, to create a risk of inadvertent, uncontrolled escalation to war. This technique has been labeled brinkmanship. This chapter proposes that states do not engage in brinkmanship. To the contrary, they seek to control inadvertent escalation risks in order to retain the ability to choose whether or not to go to war. The chapter demonstrates this proposition empirically. It shows that inadvertent escalation to war since 1945 almost never happens, suggesting that states are not deliberately creating such risks. Further, in the small number of instances that inadvertent escalation did occur, it was not because a state was deliberately creating such risks in order to make a commitment more credible. The chapter also demonstrates the lack of brinkmanship in the Berlin, Taiwan Straits, and Cuban Missile Crises, showing that contra conventional wisdom, states and leaders have the motivation and ability to control carefully escalation risks. States do not engage in brinkmanship, they do not play Russian Roulette.