America's main rivals are not allies in the traditional sense, but they can cause significant problems.
Imagine a scenario in which in a year, two or three years, the world will be shaken by war from Europe to the Pacific Ocean. The idea is not as absurd as you might think. The U.S. has not faced such a prospect of short-term military confrontation in several separate theaters in decades. In a column for Bloomberg, historian and American researcher of US foreign policy Gal Brands writes about it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine ignited the biggest conflict in Europe for several generations and provoked the struggle of great powers. The chances of war are growing in East Asia, as tensions sparked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan showed.in August In the Middle East, the US may have to choose between fighting Iran and recognizing it as a threshold state.
Put these crises together and you have the makings of a Eurasian conflagration.
Of course, nightmare scenarios usually don't come true. It is possible that none of these situations will involve the US in war, and that the most likely time limits of conflict vary by region. But this example demonstrates how pervasive the danger of a major war has become. It also reminds us that today's crises are more deeply connected than meets the eye.
America's antagonists may not be formally allies, but they are united in a critical area—central Eurasia—and along critical lines. The US cannot respond to one problem without considering its impact on its ability to deal with others. The demands for statecraft and political acumen are tough, because Washington faces a number of inescapable problems and certainly cannot afford to watch them all escalate at once.
In some ways, America's predicament is reminiscent of the period before World War II. Let alone the fact that no U.S. adversary has committed aggression or brutality on the scale of the Axis powers — although China's repression of the Uyghurs and Putin's deadly war in Ukraine are echoes of that past. Let's leave aside the fact that Putin's brutal clumsiness in Ukraine is now more like emulating Benito Mussolini than Adolf Hitler. The basic models of geopolitics look painfully familiar.
Then, as now, the international system was hit from many sides. Japan sought to dominate the Far East. Hitler's Germany claimed primacy in Europe and beyond. Mussolini's Italy took bloody steps towards an empire in the Mediterranean and Africa. The Soviet Union eventually fought Hitler—but only after helping him divide Eastern Europe.
There was little intimacy between these revisionist states. The different racist ideologies that underpinned Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were fundamentally incompatible. Although Berlin, Rome and Tokyo did sign their Tripartite Pact in 1940, widespread mistrust proved that it was little more than an agreement to undermine the existing order and build individual empires among the ruins.
However, even as the Axis powers became practical partners, there was a deep, destructive synergy between the programs of radical expansion they pursued.
The dictators supported each other at critical moments: support for Mussolini contributed to the bloodless Hitler's conquest of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. The progress of one fascist power emboldened others: Germany's invasion of Western Europe in 1940 helped encourage Japan's advance into Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the expense of a defeated France, a demoralized Britain, and a confused America.
Then, as now, the great democratic state, facing problems everywhere, tried to act decisively everywhere. In the late 1930s, Britain hesitated to take a hard line against Germany, facing simultaneous threats from Italy and Japan. The US had similar problems amid the worsening crisis in Europe and Asia. “I just don't have enough of a navy,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked in 1941.
Even military mobilization did not solve this problem completely. From start to finish, the fight against several antagonists forced the allies to make difficult compromises. It didn't take a fully integrated alliance of totalitarian adversaries to destabilize democracies and create the most serious, all-encompassing global security crisis the world has ever seen.
In the 1930s, Western leaders struggled to predict how quickly regional crises could lead to global collapse. Likewise, most post-Cold War politicians never thought that America's unipolar strategy would end this way. It is not news that autocratic states build up their armies and coerce their neighbors. What is new is that all these challenges threaten to escalate.
Eastern Europe is ablaze over Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the culmination of a generations-long campaign to restore Russian supremacy from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea. A successful blitzkrieg in February could provide Russia with a leading position in Eastern Europe and provoke new pressure on the open countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russian mistakes and Ukrainian resistance prevented this scenario. But even a reduced Russia will have plenty of opportunities to cause trouble, and the conflict in Ukraine is far from over.
Both Ukraine and Russia have ambitious goals. Kyiv seeks the liberation of the entire occupied territory, including Crimea; Moscow seeks to turn Ukraine into an impoverished vassal state. The war also unleashed a fierce struggle to contain the great powers. Washington and its allies are giving Ukraine weapons, money and intelligence to bleed Putin's army; they hit the Russian economy with sanctions. Moscow used energy pressure to make the war more painful for Europe; it is threatening nuclear escalation, hoping to limit its losses on the battlefield and limit Western support for Ukraine.
Putin seems to believe he can force his enemies to withdraw before he suffers a major defeat, while the US acts as if it can hold Putin back from escalating long enough for Ukraine to win. The result of all this is a cruel and unstable equilibrium that cannot last forever because its participants have mutually exclusive goals.
Meanwhile in the Taiwan Strait, the countdown to conflict may have begun. Beijing has used Pelosi's visit to Taiwan as a pretext for aggressive military exercises that are harbingers of rising regional tensions. Chinese officials would clearly prefer to achieve their goals of controlling Taiwan and pushing the US out of the western Pacific without a major war. Perhaps Putin's bloody mission in Ukraine has made Chinese President Xi Jinping more cautious about the use of force. However, thirty years of military buildup undoubtedly gave Xi a much better chance than the desire to conquer Taiwan.
In fact, Xi may have to use force to get what he wants: the chances of Taipei's peaceful submission to neo-totalitarian China shrinks every year, while the US and its allies seem increasingly keen to block Beijing's aspirations to regional dominance. President Joe Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, recently said that the US is in the “first years of a decisive decade” in its competition with Beijing.
There is a heated debate in Washington about when the threat of Chinese aggression will become most acute; even the most concerned observers believe that the showdown is at least two or three years away. However, the risk of war is growing as China's determination to change the balance in East Asia is matched by its rivals' determination not to.
Also, there is the ever-flammable Middle East, a region Americans would prefer to ignore. The intermittently violent conflict between Washington and Tehran nearly erupted in 2019 and early 2020 following the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and culminated in the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.
It is reported that Iran's success in enriching uranium gave it the opportunity to create nuclear weapons in a short period of time. Therefore, the US and Israel should consider the need for additional coercive methods to prevent Iran from crossing this red line. A crisis could emerge quickly—in a matter of months—if negotiations to restore the nuclear deal ultimately fail.
At the same time, the crisis may develop more slowly if the negotiations drag on indefinitely. Even assuming some sort of deal is reached, the US could still face Iran, whose nuclear infrastructure is more advanced than it was in 2015; and which could, through at least partial withdrawal, be able to obtain additional funds and push more aggressively for primacy from the Persian Gulf to the Levant.
War between the US and its rivals is not inevitable in any of these theaters. This is a separate opportunity for each of them.
Read also: The Economist: Xi Jinping and Putin want to remake the world order for themselves, but they do it differently
Healthy regional systems are the basis of healthy global systems. When several regions collapse at the same time, it can lead to the collapse of the global order. Europe, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia together form the strategic core of the great theater—Eurasia—that has been the center of global politics in the modern era. By sowing turmoil in their regions, the revisionists shake several pillars of the system at once.
Also, by simply pursuing their own goals, they create opportunities for others to use the same scenarios. Feverish tension in relations with China and Russia forces Washington to be careful with Iran. As it grapples with Putin, the Biden administration must be wary of Xi's provocations.
For its part, Putin's bet that the US focus on China would provide a weak response to his invasion of Ukraine has failed.
Read also: Atlantic Council: Russia again tried to change the borders of Europe by force. What's next?
However, the danger that the competition between the US and China could turn very ugly, and very soon, may still give Putin hope that he can win if he can just hang on.
Of course, America's rivals are mixed friends. Xi did not rescue Putin from his quagmire in Ukraine; if China, Russia, and Iran pushed the US out of Eurasia, they could fall out with each other. But neither can achieve their goals without successfully confronting the superpower, which gives them the main incentive to unite.
Also read: FT: India and China unhappy with Putin's war, but they don't support Ukraine either
Americans may not perceive the Sino-Russian relationship as an alliance, but that is largely because it lacks the clear guarantees of mutual defense that characterized post-World War II US alliances. Even so, the relationship has many of the trappings of an alliance: arms sales and military exercises; growing ties in defense technology; cooperation to support autocratic stability in Central Asia. It also involves a tacit non-aggression pact that allows Beijing and Moscow to focus on the US rather than worry about each other. A crucial reason for the increased risk of war on both sides of Eurasia is that America's two adversary superpowers can now fight back-to-back.
Iran is not in the same weight category as Russia and China, but it is part of this loose revisionist axis. Russia and Iran fought together to save the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, while China exerted influence on the UN Security Council. China and Russia have periodically shielded Tehran from US pressure by delaying or relaxing sanctions and selling weapons to Iran.
This cooperation is becoming ever closer. Tehran held trilateral naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing after tensions with Washington rose in 2019; signed a 25-year strategic partnership agreement with China in 2021; and provided Russia with hundreds of military drones for use in Ukraine.
Also read: Putin's actions could cause resentment even in countries loyal to him – The Guardian
Tehran's aid to Russia underscores a vital point: if one of the revisionists is decisively defeated, the others will face an emboldened superpower that can more aggressively attack its remaining enemies. China may not want to interfere in Ukraine. But if Xi feared that Russia was approaching a military collapse that could trigger a political collapse in Moscow, he could provide military and economic aid despite the threat of American anger.
Don't expect Russia, Iran and China will commit suicide for each other, but don't think that they will be indifferent to each other's fate.
It is often difficult for the US government to deal with more than one crisis at a time because the attention span of senior policymakers is limited. Moreover, America is now less able to confront multiple military challenges than at any time since the Cold War. Significant defense spending cuts in the early 2010s, coupled with a heightened threat environment, forced the US to adopt a “one-war” defense strategy instead of the two-war standard of the 1990s and 2000s.
Also read: NYT : The US is already at war with Russia and China at the same time
The shift reflected a belated realization that a major war with a powerful rival — especially China — would pose a significant challenge to the U.S. weapons arsenal. However, it also means that the Pentagon lacks the means to deal with violent situations in two, let alone three, theaters if they occur in close succession.
Strategy textbooks typically refer to that a country that has more obligations than opportunities must reduce the former or increase the latter. This is good long-term advice, but not very useful right now.
Proponents of an Asia-first strategy argue that the US should de-escalate confrontations and even eliminate commitments in the Middle East and Europe to focus on China. They could get a boost from a bipartisan group that was irked by Saudi Arabia's recent decision to cut oil production.
But it would be unwise to switch to such a China-oriented foreign policy. An immediate de-escalation in Ukraine could allow Putin to salvage an unlikely victory and send a message that conventional aggression backed by nuclear coercion can pay off. A significant withdrawal from the Middle East at a time when Tehran is on the brink of nuclear weapons is a recipe for either Iranian hegemony or regional anarchy. Making the right decision is difficult even in ideal conditions, let alone when opponents are advancing.
Unfortunately, the other traditional answer—spending more money—may not work either. As the war in Ukraine and a number of independent analysts have shown, the U.S. desperately needs increased defense spending to deploy the capabilities, stockpile munitions, and strengthen the industrial base necessary to win one war, let alone two or three. Washington cannot allow a short-term problem of insufficient means relative to ends to become a chronic, geopolitically debilitating condition. But if a major military build-up is required, it will take years to bear fruit — too long to make a difference if trouble soon erupts.
What remains is a strategy of consistency—trying to deal with several volatile problems without a sharp retreat or rapid offensive. The sequencing strategy takes advantage of the fact that Washington may have more time in one region than another: the turning point in Ukraine may be weeks or months away, while the moment of maximum danger with China may begin only a few years from now.
The sequence is designed to make the most of these gaps, quickly resolving certain issues and deferring confrontation elsewhere. But since this strategy is only a forced solution in the absence of better options, there is no guarantee that it will work.
First, consistency requires an end to the war in which the US is already, albeit indirectly, involved. Russia's invasion of Ukraine may have helped the US's global standing by expanding NATO and bleeding Moscow's army. But a protracted fight could ultimately hurt Washington, distracting it from the greater threat from China and forcing it to spend the money and weapons the Pentagon needs to deter — and, if necessary, fight — other conflicts.
It is hardly obvious how to end the war in Ukraine. Putin has given no hint of a desire to negotiate terms that Ukraine would or should agree to. Deterring Ukraine now, even though it has the military advantage, would set a terrible precedent, effectively legitimizing Russian aggression, and giving Moscow a chance to resume hostilities later.
Also read: “Hurricane Putin”: Why the annexation of Ukrainian territories is dangerous for everything of the world
And yet there is some vague danger that trying to drive Russia out of all of Ukraine—including Crimea—could force Putin to follow through on his nuclear threats. The war in Ukraine may become one of those paradoxical conflicts, like Korea in 1950, where getting closer to victory actually brings disaster closer.
There is no easy way out of this dilemma, and those who argue that Putin's nuclear bluff is nothing more than bragging show an extraordinary degree of analytical confidence.But the fact that Putin has so far only followed through on rhetorical threats of nuclear escalation, rather than more threatening signals such as the apparent movement of his nuclear forces, indicates that he may be trying to reap the benefits of nuclear intimidation without resorting to nuclear war . Thus, it may be worth slightly increasing the risk of an extended conflict in the near term in order to reduce the risk of a difficult, protracted war. vacate as much territory as possible before Russia can mobilize new forces — and perhaps force Putin or his successor to negotiate more seriously.
But it could also mean pressuring Ukraine to abandon some of its more ambitious, if justified, military goals (such as war crimes trials of Russian henchmen); was flexible on the issue of Crimea and to be ready for a serious diplomatic initiative when the climax on the front is reached.
The latter of these options may even work in favor of the former: European allies such as France and Germany may be willing to throw more money and weapons into Ukraine if they feel Kyiv is sensitive to their concerns about escalation.
Such an approach would require a combination of safeguards and deterrence—a clear message to Putin that the US does not seek a wider war with Russia, but that Russia will unleash that wider war if it uses nuclear weapons. This threat is a necessary component of any strategy to ensure a Ukrainian victory, even if it is unclear whether the American president will actually follow through on it if he decides to.
It is worth thinking about as an American version of the infamous Russian strategy of “escalation for the sake of de-escalation” – it can help Ukraine achieve a profitable peace, not just rushing headlong into a conflict with a nuclear power. But don't kid yourself: this approach is risky, and even if it succeeds, it will leave Ukraine with less than it deserves.
There is still time for the escalation-for-de-escalation strategy to work in Ukraine, assuming the Pentagon is right that China will not attack Taiwan for at least the next two to three years. So, the correct policy in East Asia could be called “quiet urgency”—postponing confrontation while simultaneously strengthening US defenses.
With minimal fanfare, the US should accelerate the arming of Taiwan's military with defensive equipment and push Taipei to adopt asymmetric, whole-of-society defense. , which served Ukraine well.
Washington should increase planning with Australia, Japan and Singapore to determine what military assistance it can count on in the event of a crisis, and with a larger set of democracies to plan in advance for comprehensive sanctions in the event of China's use of force. Last but not least, the US should deploy additional ships and aircraft to the region and accelerate the mass production of assets that could deter a Chinese incursion, including sea mines, unmanned aerial vehicles and underwater vehicles, as well as anti-ship missiles and precision strike weapons. The main thing is to use the feeling of anxiety caused by one war in Ukraine to seriously prepare for another.
However, contrary to the current sentiment in Washington, this approach requires the above symbolic steps, which do not help Taiwan and give Beijing a pretext to attack. Signal visits by congressional leaders and provocative name changes to Taiwan's unofficial mission in Washington are bad ideas. Recognition of Taiwan as an independent country, as suggested by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would be even worse. Until the US is ready to defend Taiwan, it should act quietly.
Read also: Bloomberg: The war in Ukraine showed why the US is not ready for war with China
This is not all about the Middle East East, where—as usual—choices are lousy, and only damage limitation can be the best outcome. The US negotiating position is weak because Iran is confident that Washington is desperate to avoid a major crisis. However, most options for increasing U.S. influence, such as a plausible threat to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, seem unduly risky amid tensions with the two major nuclear powers. , postponing the choice between confrontation and capitulation. Even a deeply flawed diplomatic deal on Iran's nuclear project would at least postpone a military-political clash, perhaps until the Iranian regime, which faces increasingly acute domestic challenges to its rule, will go down in history.
