We are now, once again, living in the preliminary phase of an international confrontation that will rapidly evolve into a world war, if nuclear and conventional deterrence against territorial conquest is not shored-up by the democracies. Full spectrum nuclear and conventional deterrence, and Soviet appreciation of the costs of war, kept the Cold War stand-off from escalating into a Third World War. However, nuclear weapons deterrence will not guarantee prevention of World War Four (over either Ukraine, Taiwan, the Straits of Hormuz, or the Korean peninsula), just as the incendiary and nerve gas assault against the European capitals by bomber fleets never deterred or took place as the widely predicted opening attack of the Second World War. Instead, German leader Adolf Hitler chose to fight by armored conquest, and all of his adversaries complied. Washington and its global allies need to be on the lookout for deterrence crises in these minor theatres: war will not start with an immediate Russian attack on Poland or even a direct Chinese amphibious landing on Taiwan’s coast. World Wars are never an intention of foreign policy, but instead escalate from failed attempts at a quick land grab by authoritarian states, in face of an unprepared and slowly coalescing democratic coalition.
There are three important requirements for deterrence to hold against the escalation of local threats to global war. First, the democracies must have at least a single member incentivized to provide both strategic nuclear deterrence, and the conventional transoceanic forces necessary for regional intervention in situations where a stability-instability paradox cancels out opposing nuclear arsenals. For example, the stability-instability paradox explains that the reciprocal deterrence by the 12,000 ton Nazi arsenal of Tabun nerve gas, and Allied VX gas and biological weapons, defaulted the Second World War to be fought by tanks and incendiary bombs. A very similar dynamic could neutralize the nuclear arsenals of China, North Korea, and the U.S., leading to a conventional war over Taiwan or the Korean peninsula, or at least delay the first desperate use of a nuclear weapon to signal resolve by the loser. Consequently, the U.S. needs “escalation dominant” nuclear weapons to deter China’s use of nukes, while also being able to land U.S. Marines on Taiwan to defend and/or liberate it.
Second, the democracies must form a credible alliance framework for mobilization. NATO and its Partnership architecture is well-suited for this purpose, especially given the challenges of setting-up a similar alliance in East Asia and the Persian Gulf. Ironically, the lack of policy controversy so common during the Cold War, over command of the integrated Mediterranean fleet strategy, over nuclear weapons sharing, about whether tactical nuclear war should be initiated at the East German border or at the Rhine, indicate the lack of serious consideration of the implications of deterring China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. During the Cold War, Tehran was as hostile to Moscow as it was to the U.S., a situation that now no longer holds. It is conceivable today that a Russian airborne division landing on the southern littoral of the Straits of Hormuz would now be conducted with the coordinated support, air cover, and supplies of Iranian forces at Bandar Abbas, supplied by Chinese ordinance factories.
What democratic coordinated efforts do exist, such as the Interparliamentary Alliance on China, are rudimentary synchronization efforts by a minority of elites that hardly influence their domestic politics. In Canada, for example, the federal government has refused to identify those members of parliament that have been recognized by Canada’s intelligence service (CSIS) as colluding with hostile foreign powers. By both Europe and by Canada, NATO membership is being used as a substitute rather than as focus of national defense efforts, demonstrated by the repeated failure of Brussels to solve the collective action problem of producing artillery shells for the war in Ukraine.
Third, there have been few explicit warnings about what would happen, except in the broadly vague sense of triggering NATO’s Article Five, if any of the vital interests of the democracies is threatened or actually attacked. Rational deterrence theory has argued that there are three necessary conditions for deterrence to succeed: sufficient military capabilities, credible willingness to use force, and communication of that threat. Far too much discussion has focused on the sufficiency of force, and credibility issues, and far too little on the most easily forgotten ingredient of communicating a warning. It was the simple error of excluding South Korea from the U.S. sphere of deterrent protection that made Beijing and Moscow feel safe to back the June 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea. Pakistan was emboldened to initiate the 1965 War because of reluctance in New Delhi to warn against any adventurism in Kashmir. The reasons for the failure to communicate are always the same. There is, first, a reluctance to alarm and appear irresponsibly belligerent to the domestic electorate. Second, there is the misguided notion that not mentioning a dispute will reduce the likelihood that it will become inflamed and lead to war.
There does not need to be an existential threat to a country for its leaders to think it is worth the risk to trigger a war. While the sustainability of Nazi Germany’s autarkic and price-controlled economy, and the reputation of the Nazi Party tied to it, were doomed, Adolf Hitler gambled against a world order that blocked his aspiration of growing Germany to a population of 250 million on other people’s land. In 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor in a desperate attempt to buy time to finish its conquest of China. Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping face an existential threat to their countries, but both believe it is worth staking the survival of their respective authoritarian regimes on a high-risk strategy to grasp at becoming a world power through regional conquest.
University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer has demonstrated in his 2001 Tragedy of the Great Powers, that continental states will risk their territorial futures for the opportunity of becoming regional hegemons, because of the obvious benefit of near total security that dominating a region allows. Regional hegemons, of which the U.S. is the only example (completely dominating North and Central America, including Canada and Mexico), are able to exclude foreign powers from their own region, through the low cost expedient of interfering with them in their respective region. China is too busy preparing for war against Taiwan to establish a major base and alliance against the U.S. with Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil (although the USSR did try and set-up a strategic base in Cuba and Nicaragua during the Cold War). In this fashion, the U.S. has preoccupied India with Pakistan, China with Japan, Russia with Germany, Egypt with Israel, Iran with Saudi Arabia, Indonesia with Australia, Thailand with Vietnam, and would if required back Argentina against Brazil, Angola against South Africa, Cote D’Ivoire against Nigeria, and Kenya against Tanzania and Ethiopia.
Contrary to popular histories, the September 1939 French and British declarations of war against Germany, in response to its invasion of Poland, was not intended to herald the beginning of the Second World War. As with the dispute between Sparta and Athens over Corcyra that was to escalate into the Peloponnesian War, or the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June of 1914, the local conflicts evolved into World Wars as major powers saw opportunities to resolve long-standing strategic dilemmas. According to the venerable Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, wars that draw in originally neutral states into one of the two opposing alliances, thereby removing the uncertainty of the foreign policy of uncommitted states, cancel the deterrence against the attack calculations of the aggressors states (those states most intent on replacing the status quo distribution of benefits in the international system with a new revisionist territorial, commercial and international institutional order).
The First World War began, for both the Central Powers, and democratic Allies, as quick campaigns, primarily focused on Berlin blocking the interference of France in German Imperial designs in Ukraine. Neutral world opinion likely deterred the use of gas against population centers in 1915 and thereafter, despite the war resembling a total effort in almost every other respect.
The reason the widely predicted incendiary and gas bomber attacks against the respective capitals of Paris, Berlin and London, never took place at the outbreak of the Second World War, was because Hitler intended to achieve victory through a series of limited and rapid fait accompli conquests, including, in sequence, Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, and Poland in September, France in May of 1940, and culminating in a victory over Moscow by the end of 1941, and Persian oil by 1942. It is the paradoxical absence of the use of gas bombs, despite the enormous death toll among soldiers and non-combatants, that neither the First or Second World Wars had actually satisfied the complete definition of a total war, or reached Karl von Clausewitz’s definition of an absolute war. The siding of Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union (in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), and the persisting isolationism of U.S. public opinion, made Berlin feel that an attack on Poland was safe from an immediate widening of the conflict.
In his 1938 Germany and a Lightning War, Fritz Sternberg argued that the experience of the First World War showed that Germany, even with its military-technical expertise, could not win a protracted total war. It was conceivable that an under-industrialized Russia could be defeated in the First World War, but there were absolutely no Nazi plans for defeating the USSR backed by U.S. industrial might. While totalitarian propaganda could temporarily neutralize the German people’s reluctance to fight (recalling that within its borders were 11 million former Communist voters), Germany lacked the oil, food and other resources necessary for an attritional contest. Hitler knew that given the political shock in Washington at the Fall of France in June of 1940, the latter widely thought to be the world’s strongest army behind the most sophisticated defensive fortifications in the world, it was just a matter of time before the U.S. would exploit an excuse to enter the war as it had previously in the First World War. Hitler was almost certainly aware that after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in early December of 1941, and with the Wehrmacht’s failure to take Moscow a month later, that Germany had one more summer and autumn campaign season to neutralize the Soviet Union before it would face the fate of inevitable defeat.
Beijing may today hope that the Russian and Iranian distraction of Europe and the U.S., respectively, would afford it the opportunity to move against Taiwan. Washington persists in its vague assurances to the defense of Taiwan, refusing to deploy ground troops as it had done as recently as April of 1979. It made sense at the time, since Washington was exploiting the Sino-Soviet split that had developed since 1959, and by siding with Beijing, it compelled the Soviets to shift 1/3 of their entire military and tactical nuclear arsenal to the East of the Ural Mountain range. Today, the long frontiers of Norway and Finland, and the former’s Arctic possessions, if violated by Russia, would likely produce a stand-off of inactivity. This dysfunctional response during the Second World War, the Sitzkrieg (or “sitting war”), was a seven month period of inactivity after the September 1939 attack on Poland, during which Germany was afforded the time to build-up and then conquer Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, and France, by June of 1940. Fortunately today, declaratory policy and operational plans are far more explicit for the defense of Baltic NATO allies and Poland, the Straits of Hormuz, Filipino South China Sea islands, South Korea and Japan, largely because U.S. forces are deployed there on the ground. In some instances, such as the war in Ukraine, deterrent ambiguity is useful because it robs Putin of the ability to activate outrage among Russia’s mobilization-age cohort. Thus Moscow is trapped in a war whose expense is multiplied by the need to employ relatively ineffective technical expedients, such using rocket bombardments to shift Ukrainian public opinion, and the predicament of having to hire overpaid foreign mercenaries and contractors.
U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were constrained by American public opinion and their own strategic myopia in abandoning the people of Eastern and Central Europe to Bolshevism at the end of the Second World War, without which a confrontation with the Soviet Union would have been far more short-lived. Obviously the U.S. and British populations were hardly in the mood to support a new war aimed at pushing the large Soviet army back to its borders. However, as with the implied nuclear threat by President Truman against Soviet forces backing the Azeri separatists in the Iranian civil war in 1946, the U.S. could have intimidated a Soviet retreat out of much of Eastern Europe, and thereby avoided the Cold War confrontation with the Warsaw Pact.
China will not attack Taiwan directly, nor Russia drive directly into Poland, or Iran seize both shores of the Straits of Hormuz. Rather, applying erosion tactics, they will all attack easier tangential targets that can be accumulated and later contribute to a major attack. China will boldly seize the offshore Taiwanese Islands including Pratas and Taiping Island, Russia will target Norwegian Arctic island possessions, and Iran will push cohorts more deeply into Iraq. To preserve the peace, the democratic frontline should be pushed out to the periphery. To deter China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, under these circumstances, requires NATO and its democratic allies to focus on defending the smaller states on the peripheries. Consequently, contesting local threats to allies today, by Russia, China and Iran, is vital because authoritarian states have repeatedly proven that they are capable of accumulating occupied people and redirecting their productive efforts against the spread of democracy. We see this coercive harnessing of free people into supporting authoritarian economies in how Beijing has suppressed the people of Hong Kong, and how Russia has demonstrated its brutal occupations of Chechnya and parts of Ukraine, such as Mariupol.
