There are some stark differences between the current confrontation and the First and Second World Wars. Any NATO-Russian military struggle would unequivocally be fought under the umbrella of the world’s two largest, and fourth and fifth placed (French and British), nuclear arsenals. A war over Taiwan would add China as the world’s third largest arsenal. Because of mutual deterrence, the Second World War was fought without the use of nerve gasses against urban non-combatants, which implies by analogy that there is no necessary escalation to nuclear weapon use. Thus, Chinese marines landing on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, NATO and Russian aircraft sparring over the Arctic or clashing along the Latvian border, or Russo-Chinese heliborne forces seizing Khasab in the Straits of Hormuz, on behalf of Iran, are conceivably likely. Nuclear arsenals may provide aggressors a margin of safety against total defeat, incentivizing adventurism. Another major difference with the world wars is that there is almost no enthusiasm among the young men of the major powers for the glory of an armed confrontation, unlike the lead-up to the First World War. Instead, the leaders of all of Russia, China and Iran, are distrustful and cautious in their mobilization of their under-35 urban male populations.
The causes, and therefore the experiences of the periods of peace immediately preceding world wars, that help us judge where we are now situated, vary dramatically. There is a similar dynamic in that all of the world wars involve a dissatisfied major power that confronts a rapidly closing window of opportunity, then haphazardly cobbles together a small alliance (minimum winning coalition) of jackal bandwagoners (states seeking war for territorial aggrandizement), and uses military force in a series of local conflicts that eventually escalate to include most of the world’s major powers. In almost all cases, there is a common dysfunction of unpreparedness, particularly among English-speaking liberal democracies and their democratic allies, and a dramatic and traumatic shift as politicians that are essentially inexperienced in international affairs, navigate the challenges of a local conflict spreading into a global war.
The current global security competition between China and the U.S. most closely resembles the period leading up to the First World War. Both included an intense naval armaments race, driven by a consuming fear of being blockaded from world trade, and global financial rivalry, with Chinese investments challenging the established order in Southeast Asia and South America, the Middle East and Africa. The key difference is that China is less fearful of more populous, younger and more rapidly industrializing India, than Germany was of rapid economic growth in Imperial Russia. Also, Germany sought to expand eastward into Ukraine to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, whereas while China has no such designs in India, Beijing may seek annexation of the Amur region and the Russian Far East as far as Irkutsk to offset the effects of climate change on its arable land. Most importantly, the U.S. is far more unequivocally committed to blocking a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the Philippines, or Japan, than Great Britain was in deterring Germany.
While the precipitous June 28, 1914, assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand was unforeseen, Europe had gradually militarized its diplomacy in response to a series of crises, and a short war between France and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary, was not unexpected. The unprecedented firepower deployed in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War brought hostilities to a negotiated close after six months, and was the basis for future expectations of a short war. Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck leveraged the French shock of defeat (French Emperor Louis Napoleon III was captured) to sign a peace before France could politically organize a popular mass mobilization. The Agadir Crisis, in Morocco in 1911, and the two Balkan Wars (1912-1913), intensified the training of millions of conscripts. The Wilhelmine German leadership was facing a rapidly industrializing Imperial Russia, fuelled by French investment, and the faltering stability of its Austro-Hungarian ally, rapidly eroded by rising Slavic nationalism. Because Germany was a hybrid state consisting of an influential monarchy and military caste, and contentious political parties, the assassination contrived a rare convergence of popular sentiments, and therefore an irresistible opportunity for war. Consequently, Germany could not wait another decade for its fleet of dreadnoughts, which was entangled in a ship-building arms race against Great Britain’s Royal Navy, to achieve superiority.
The First World War would likely have been avoided had Great Britain made its naval blockade, its commitment to deploying an army in France, and its intention to dismantle the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German colonial empires, explicit. The misleading British experience in the 1853-56 Crimean War, which included France, Great Britain and Russia, three of the world’s great powers, and the loss of over 600,000 lives, was that a global conflict like the preceding 1803-1815 Napoleonic Wars, was containable to the continent, and avoidable. The prevailing but incorrect explanation for the war in Anglo-Saxon academe and journalism was that the First World War was the inadvertent result of the illusory incentives for offensive operations, tensions caused by arms manufacturers and arms races, and imperial capitalism. However, historian Fritz Fischer, in his originally controversial 1961 study, Germany’s War Aims, has largely re-confirmed the old conventional wisdom that indeed it was a militaristic Germany that was the aggressor, re-affirming the Treaty of Versailles’ attribution of war guilt.
There are similarities with pre-First World War Wilhelmine Germany to the extent that the Chinese Communist Party of General Secretary Xi Jinping is seeking to establish the People’s Republic of China as the world’s leading economic, scientific and military power. Both Germany and China have citizens that are expecting global influence commensurate with their significant share of economic manufacturing, and there is therefore popular support for a powerful navy to protect China’s far-flung commercial engagement. In Germany, the nationalist propaganda of Weltpolitik, united the aristocracy, army, colonialists, navalists, factory owners, domestic and foreign investors, rural landowners, farmers, and industrial workers, at least for a short time, and made it possible for Germany to trigger the First World War.
By contrast, China’s under-35 cohort in the coastal provinces, and those not dependent on employment or pensions from state-owned enterprises, are far less grateful to the Communist Party for industrialization. Strategically, unlike Germany, China is not only not encircled by rapidly expanding adversaries but is actually protected by substantial land and sea barriers. While China has demonstrated its aggressiveness in attacking neighboring Korea (1950), Taiwan (1954, 1958), India (1962), the Soviet Union (1969), Vietnam (1979), Myanmar and the Philippines, only against Taiwan is Beijing seeking a significant transfer of territory. Despite the character of the Chinese people being transformed by globalization, the Chinese Communist Party is pursuing cultural isolationism and aggressive assimilation as its principal strategy to remain in power, rather than a diversionary war to rouse Han nationalism and cement its legitimacy.
The U.S. should continue focusing the bulk of its military efforts countering China in Asia, consisting of a significantly increased air deployment in the Philippines, a surprise redeployment of a division-sized force plus several shorter-range F-16 and A-10 air wings to Taiwan, and select islands, and contingency forces in Hokkaido, Japan, for intervention on behalf of Russians in the event of a Chinese land-grab of the Amur region. A Chinese seizure of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk would result in a Chinese presence on the Arctic coast of Yakutia within a few years. The stabilization of Asia needs an explicitly institutionalized alliance like NATO, complete with a military and nuclear committee, an Article V, and an associated agency to coordinate with ASEAN in the event of a U.S. naval blockade of Chinese commerce. The presence of U.S. and allied soldiers in Taiwan will be less provocative than heretofore imagined, especially as it is a return to the status quo ante, well within the political memory of Beijing’s communist regime. Violent aerial and naval provocations against this Asian democratic alliance, which may serve the institutional interests of the People’s Liberation Army, will quickly run counter to the economic interests of the Chinese government and people, just as they do now.
While Russia, China and Iran are as poorly coordinated in strategy as the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan, they are far more economically complementary like the Central Power allies of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman, in the First World War. Russian and Chinese technology, Russian and Iranian energy, Chinese manufacturing, and Russian nuclear weapons, make for a potentially powerful partnership. North Korea offers at best a distraction, which may backfire if Chinese troops are needed to hold off a South Korean counter-attack. However, Xi Jinping is thought to have warned Putin against the use of nuclear weapons, and Beijing is not currently interested in joining Moscow in a military confrontation with the West. Also, like the disintegrating aristocratic regimes of the Central Powers, all of Russia, China and Iran are desperately fending off an inevitable process of democratization, which may manifest itself as a peaceful coup or violent revolution. While the coalition of democracies is at its historical largest, the growing awareness of the possibility of an escalation from the Ukraine conflict to a general European War, or an attack on Taiwan, has not yet galvanized serious increases in defense spending.
It is difficult to imagine, but the Russian war with Ukraine would pale in comparison to the intensity, geographic scale and even numbers of soldiers involved in a China-U.S. War over Taiwan. According to figures from the 2024 IISS Military Balance, the China-Russia comparison in satellites (245 to 93), combat aviation (3,200 to 1,300), annual combat aircraft production in 2023 (240 to 50), submarines (59 to 50), and surface combat ships (101 to 33), let alone China’s ten-fold population, GDP, and defense spending over Russia, which would pose a peer-challenge to the U.S. and its allies. Only in strategic nuclear weapons does Russia have a gradually eroding ten-fold advantage in warhead numbers (500 to 5,580), of which perhaps half are strategic, as well as a comparable number of main battle tanks (4,700 to 3,500) and soldiers. There is also the question of the extent to which the elites would prop-up each other. Beijing is concerned that Moscow is being trapped and exhausted by the Ukraine War, without as yet a clear war termination strategy, even given the history of Russian conflict management, which could lead to regime change. Will Russian troops enter Tehran or Chinese troops take stewardship of Russian territory East of the Urals, in a manner like Nazi Germany’s 1943 invasion of Italy when Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was deposed?
The lesson at the conclusion of the First World War, only half-learned, and which was undercut in its application by the Great Depression and the consequent social upheavals of the 1930s, was that threats of aggression need to be confronted directly. Russia’s people must be made aware of the consequences of nuclear weapons use in Ukraine or a direct confrontation with NATO. The U.S. has not yet explicitly warned China of all the consequences of an attempted invasion of Taiwan, including a naval blockade and missile strikes against the interior of China. Nor has Iran been warned that a U.S. Marine Corps intervention against a closure of the Straits of Hormuz, may mean seizure of the Iranian islands of Sirri and Abu Musa, and the ports of Chab Bahar and Bandar Abbas. Deterrence works far less well against committed aggressors when it is implied, and not stated bluntly.
