Russia and China cannot be called allies in the usual sense of the term, but their coordinated actions can significantly shake the global influence of the United States, writes the author of the Bloomberg article. The Pentagon will not have enough funds to cope with unforeseen circumstances in several theaters of military operations.
Hal BrandsImagine that in a year or two there will be a brutal war in the world all over the territory from Europe to the Pacific Ocean.
This idea is not as absurd as it may seem. The United States has not faced such prospects of a short-term military confrontation on several fronts for a long time.
The special military operation of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine provoked the largest conflict in Europe in several decades and the mediated struggle of the great powers. The likelihood of war in East Asia is growing, as evidenced by the tension after the August trip to Taiwan by the Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. As for the Middle East, the United States may face a choice: to go to war with Iran or recognize it as a near-nuclear state.
Taken together, these crises are fraught with conflagration across Eurasia.
Catastrophic scenarios rarely materialize, and the United States is likely to avoid war on all three fronts, and the most likely timing of the conflict depends on the specific region. But the very thought of this speaks of the danger of a major war and reminds us that the connection of the current crises is much deeper than it seems.
Although America's opponents are not formal allies, they are united by several key points. The US cannot respond to one problem without considering its impact on the ability to cope with others. The requirements for the American state approach will be serious, because Washington faces a number of problems that are not so easy to get rid of, and, of course, it cannot allow them to worsen at the same time.
In a sense, America's situation resembles the period before the outbreak of World War II. The basic patterns 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 supremacy in Europe and beyond. Mussolini's Italy made bloody attempts to create an empire in the Mediterranean and Africa. The Soviet Union had to do away with Hitler, after allowing him to dismember Eastern Europe.
There were almost no friendly relations between these revisionist states. The various racist ideologies that guided Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were fundamentally incompatible. Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, although they signed the Triple Pact in 1940, because of their distrust of each other, turned it into nothing more than a vague agreement to undermine the existing order and create separate empires on its ruins.
And yet, there was a deep, destructive interaction between the radical expansion programs carried out by the Axis Powers.
Dictators supported each other at critical moments: Mussolini's support helped Hitler to conquer Austria and the Sudetenland without losses in 1938. The successes of one fascist power emboldened others: Germany's successes in Western Europe in 1940 (victory over France, Great Britain's despair and America's confusion) helped convince Japan to advance into Southeast Asia and the Pacific region.
Then, as now, faced with many problems at the same time, the democratic Powers struggled to act decisively. At the end of the 1930s, Britain did not dare to adopt a tough policy towards Germany due to simultaneous threats from Italy and Japan. The United States has faced similar problems amid the worsening crises in Europe and Asia. “I simply don't have enough naval forces to operate in both directions,” President Franklin Roosevelt said in 1941.
Even military mobilization could not completely eliminate the problem. From beginning to end, the struggle with several opponents forced the allies to make painful compromises. Totalitarian states did not even need a fully integrated alliance to unbalance democracies and create the largest global security crisis in history.
In the 1930s, Western leaders struggled to predict how quickly regional crises would lead to global collapse. And after the end of the cold war, most politicians did not think that the unipolar world led by the United States would end like this. It is not news to anyone that autocratic powers are building up troops and intimidating neighbors by force. What is new here is that all these problems threaten to escalate.
There is unrest in Eastern Europe because of Putin's special operation in Ukraine, which has become the culmination of a long-term campaign to restore Russian dominance in the territory from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea. A successful blitzkrieg in February could provide Russia with a dominant position in Eastern Europe and put even more pressure on NATO countries. This scenario was avoided. But even a weakened Russia will have enough opportunities to create problems, and the conflict in Ukraine is far from over.
Ambitious goals are pursued by both Ukraine and Russia. Kiev seeks to return territories, including Crimea, and Moscow seeks to turn Ukraine into a dependent state. Washington and its allies are providing Ukraine with weapons, money and intelligence to drain Putin's army, while simultaneously damaging the Russian economy through sanctions. Moscow uses energy coercion to make the conflict even more painful for Europe, and threatens nuclear escalation in the hope of limiting both its own losses on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine.
Putin seems to believe that he can force the enemies to leave, and the United States acts as if it can keep Moscow from escalating for as long as Ukraine needs. As a result, an unstable equilibrium arises, which cannot be maintained forever, since the parties pursue exclusively antagonistic goals.
Meanwhile, a conflict in the Taiwan Strait may break out at any moment. Beijing used Pelosi's visit to Taiwan as a pretext for aggressive military exercises, which became a harbinger of growing regional tensions. Chinese officials would certainly prefer to achieve the goals of controlling the island and leveling US influence in the western Pacific without a major war. It is quite possible that Putin's actions in Ukraine have forced Chinese President Xi Jinping to be more cautious about the use of force. Nevertheless, he has been building up military power for 30 years and, if he wants, he can subdue Taiwan without much effort.
In general, Xi will most likely have to use force to achieve his goal: Taipei's chances of peaceful submission to neo-totalitarian China are decreasing year by year, and the United States and its allies seem to increasingly want to deprive Beijing of regional domination ambitions. National Security adviser to President Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, recently said that the United States is at the beginning of a "decisive decade" when the conditions of rivalry with China will be established.
In Washington, disputes about when exactly the threat of Chinese aggression will become most acute do not subside; even the most anxious observers believe that the denouement is still at least two or three years away. Nevertheless, the risk of war increases as the desire of China's opponents to maintain the balance of power in East Asia increases.
Then there is the flammable Middle East region, which Americans would be happy to ignore. The periodically escalating rivalry between Washington and Tehran almost detonated in 2019 – early 2020 after a series of events, starting with the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement and ending with the assassination of General Qasem Suleimani as a result of a drone strike.
It is reported that Iran's achievements in the field of uranium enrichment have given it the opportunity to create nuclear weapons in a short time. Therefore, the US and Israel should consider the expediency of additional methods of coercion to prevent Iran from crossing the line. In the event of a final failure of negotiations on the resumption of the nuclear agreement, the crisis may come in just a few months.
If the negotiations drag on indefinitely, it will develop more slowly. Even if an agreement is reached, the United States may still face a number of problems: Iran has a much more developed nuclear infrastructure than in 2015; it has acquired additional funds thanks to partial easing of sanctions and can actively fight for primacy in the territories from the Persian Gulf to the Levant.
The US war with rivals can be avoided in any of the above-mentioned theaters of military operations. But in all cases it is quite real.
The health of regional systems depends on the health of global ones. When several regions flare up at the same time, the global order can collapse. Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia together form the strategic core of a larger theater of military operations — Eurasia — which has become the center of modern global politics. By sowing unrest in the regions, the revisionists are undermining several pillars of the system at once.
Moreover, their pursuit of their own goals alone creates opportunities for others. Feverish tensions in relations with China and Russia are forcing Washington to be cautious with Iran. And against the backdrop of difficult relations with Putin, the Biden administration should beware of provocations against Xi Jinping.
Putin, in turn, made a mistake by betting that America's focus on China would not allow it to give a strong response to the special operation. Nevertheless, the danger of intensifying competition between the United States and China may still give Putin hope to wait for victory.
Of course, America's rivals are not very friendly with each other. Xi Jinping did not pull Putin out of the Ukrainian quagmire, but managed to oust the United States from Eurasia. China, Russia and Iran may quarrel among themselves. None of them can achieve these goals without successfully confronting the superpower, and this is their main incentive to unite.
Americans do not consider Sino-Russian relations to be allied only because they do not have clear guarantees of mutual defense, which have characterized all US alliances since the Second World War. Nevertheless, there are plenty of relevant signs in these relations:
- arms sales and military exercises;
- expanding ties in the field of defense technologies;
- cooperation to maintain autocratic stability in Central Asia.
It also includes an unspoken non-aggression pact that allows Beijing and Moscow to focus on the United States rather than worry about each other. The most important reason for the increasing risk of war on both sides of Eurasia is that America's two great-power opponents have been given the opportunity to fight “back to back”.
Iran, though not in the same weight category as Russia and China, is part of this shaky revisionist axis. Russia and Iran fought together to save the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and China helped resolve issues in the UN Security Council. China and Russia have periodically protected Tehran from US pressure by postponing or easing sanctions and selling weapons to Iran.
This cooperation is becoming more and more focused. After tensions in its relations with Washington sharply increased in 2019, Tehran held trilateral naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing, signed a 25-year strategic partnership with China in 2021, and has now provided Russia with hundreds of military drones for use in Ukraine.
Tehran's help to Russia draws attention to a very important point: if one of the revisionists suffers a decisive defeat, the rest will have to face a superpower that will target the remaining enemies even more aggressively. China may not want to interfere in the Ukrainian issue. Nevertheless, if Xi feels that a political collapse may occur in Russia, he may change his mind about not providing her with economic and military assistance, despite the prospect of provoking American anger.
Neither Russia, nor Iran, nor China will take suicidal steps for the sake of others, but they will also care about each other's fate.
The US government is often unable to make great efforts to overcome more than one crisis at a time, because the attention of senior politicians is limited. Moreover, America currently has fewer opportunities to cope with numerous military challenges than at any time since the Cold War. Significant cuts in defense spending in the early 2010s, combined with an increase in the number of threats, forced the United States to adopt a defense strategy of “one war”, not two, as it was in the 1990s and 2000s.
This shift reflected the belated realization that a major war with a powerful rival (especially China) would lead to maximum strain on the US armed forces. At the same time, the Pentagon obviously does not have enough funds to cope with unforeseen circumstances in two, not to mention three theaters of military operations.
It is generally believed that, having more obligations than opportunities, a country should either reduce the first or increase the second. This is reasonable long-term advice, but it's not particularly relevant right now.
Proponents of the so-called Asian strategy argue that the United States should defuse confrontation and even abandon commitments in the Middle East and Europe, shifting the focus to China. The corresponding impulse may cause the anger of both parties associated with the recent decision of Saudi Arabia to reduce oil production.
But the transition to such a foreign policy is unreasonable. Immediate de-escalation in Ukraine will allow Putin to secure some kind of victory and demonstrate the effectiveness of a non-nuclear conflict coupled with nuclear blackmail. A significant retreat from the Middle East against the background of Tehran's "near-nuclear" will lead either to Iranian hegemony or to regional anarchy. Cost reductions are difficult to achieve even in ideal conditions, not to mention the fact that rivals are developing.
Alas, another traditional answer may not work — spending more money. As the conflict in Ukraine and many impartial analytical reports have shown, the United States desperately needs to increase military spending in order to deploy the potential, increase the supply of ammunition and strengthen the industrial base necessary to win at least one war, let alone two or three. Washington cannot allow a short—term problem — a lack of funds relative to goals - to turn into a chronic, geopolitically debilitating condition. A major military buildup will take years, and something will need to be changed quickly if trouble happens in the near future.
There remains only a sequencing strategy (step-by-step sequence) aimed at coping with several unstable problems without retreating from any and not allowing them to develop. The strategy is based on the fact that Washington may have more time at its disposal in one region than in another: in Ukraine, the decisive moment may come in weeks or months, and the maximum danger from China — only in a few years.
A step-by-step sequence is needed in order to quickly resolve certain issues and at the same time postpone confrontation in other places. It's not a fact, however, that this will work only due to the lack of alternatives.
First, it will be necessary to end the conflict in which the United States is already involved, albeit indirectly. The situation in Ukraine may have helped the global position of the United States, leading to the expansion of NATO. However, in the end, a prolonged struggle can harm Washington, which is distracted from the Chinese threat, squandering money and weapons necessary for the Pentagon to contain, and if necessary, to fight within the framework of other conflicts.
Ways to end the conflict in Ukraine are not obvious. Putin has shown no desire to negotiate the conditions that Ukraine can or should accept. Deterring Ukraine now would set a terrible precedent and give Moscow a chance to resume hostilities later.
There is some unquantifiable danger that an attempt to squeeze Russian forces out of the entire territory of Ukraine, including Crimea, could lead to Putin carrying out nuclear threats. The conflict in Ukraine can be likened to the Korean one (1950), when every step towards victory actually brings disaster closer.
There are no easy ways out of this dilemma, and those who claim the opposite — that Putin is just bragging — demonstrate an amazing degree of analytical self-confidence. But the fact that so far Putin has threatened nuclear escalation only in words, without undertaking any obvious movements of nuclear forces, indicates a possible attempt to limit himself to threats and not spend money on a nuclear war. Perhaps in the near future it is worth taking a slightly higher risk of conflict expansion in order to reduce the risk of a protracted conflict.
This means a significant increase in the supply of weapons and other support to Kiev over the next few months. And, maybe, to push Putin or his successor to more serious negotiations.
It may also mean pressure on Ukraine to soften, if justified, some of its most ambitious military goals, to show flexibility regarding the ownership of Crimea and to put forward a diplomatic initiative.
The latter may even benefit the former: European allies, the same France and Germany, may be willing to send Ukraine more money and weapons if they feel that Kiev is responding to their concerns about escalation.
Such an approach will require guarantees and deterrence — clearly informing Putin that the United States does not seek a large-scale war with Russia, but in the case of the use of nuclear weapons it will not be avoided. This is a necessary component of any strategy that will allow Ukraine to win, even in the absence of clarity as to whether the American president will do such a thing.
Think of it as America's turn to Russia's infamous “from escalation to de-escalation” strategy: it can help Ukraine achieve peace on favorable terms. But make no mistake: this approach is risky, and even if it succeeds, Ukraine will get less than it deserves.
There is still time for the “from escalation to de-escalation” strategy to work in Ukraine, if the Pentagon is right and China does not attack Taiwan at least in the next couple of years. Thus, in East Asia, the right policy could be called a “calm necessity” — postponing confrontation while strengthening the US defense capability.
With minimal noise, Washington should accelerate the equipping of the Taiwanese armed forces with means of restricting and prohibiting access and maneuver and push Taipei to adopt the same asymmetric protection of the whole society that has served Ukraine well.
Washington should strengthen cooperation with Australia, Japan and Singapore to determine what military assistance it can count on in the event of a crisis, and with a wider range of democratic countries to plan comprehensive sanctions in advance in case China uses force. Last but not least, the US needs to deploy additional ships and aircraft in the region and accelerate the mass production of means to hinder the Chinese invasion, including naval mines, unmanned aerial vehicles and underwater vehicles, anti-ship missiles and other types of high-precision long-range strike weapons. The main thing is to use the sense of anxiety caused by the situation in Ukraine to prepare for military action elsewhere.
However, contrary to the current mood in Washington, such an approach requires the rejection of symbolic steps that do not help Taiwan, but give Beijing a reason for retaliatory actions. Ostentatious visits by congressional leaders and provocative changes in the name of the unofficial Taiwan mission in Washington are bad ideas. Recognition of Taiwan as an independent country, as proposed by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is even worse. Until the US is ready to defend Taiwan, it should not allow itself to make rash statements, while at the same time continuing to build up power.
Thus, there remains the Middle East, where the choice, as always, is small, and the best option would be simply to limit the damage. The weak negotiating position of the United States is due to Iran's confidence that Washington is desperately trying to avoid a serious crisis. Nevertheless, most options for strengthening US influence, such as the real threat of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, seem unreasonably risky against the background of tensions in relations with two powerful nuclear powers.
The sequencing strategy involves playing for time and delaying the choice between confrontation and surrender. Even a deeply imperfect diplomatic deal on the Iranian nuclear project will delay the military-political confrontation only until the Iranian regime sinks into oblivion, unable to cope with serious internal challenges.
If you think sensibly, Iran's intransigence, along with the political maelstrom in Washington, make this option unworkable. In this case, the United States and Israel can resort to creative coercion: strengthening covert operations, cyber attacks, expanding economic sanctions, and even selling Israel advanced bombs to destroy bunkers that would allow it to really threaten a unilateral attack.
The “success” in the Middle East will be the ongoing tense relations with Iran, which has a substantial nuclear infrastructure at its disposal. But everything can easily go down the drain. Even if the United States procrastinates, Israel's patience may not last. Coercion, almost tantamount to war, will provoke a military response from Iran. Or Iran will increase pressure on the US to gain an advantage.
America may simply not be able to control the place and time of crises in an increasingly less stable system. Her opponents don't have to follow the same scenario. China may bet that it is better to attack Taiwan before the conflict in Ukraine is resolved. And Russia may refuse to settle in the hope that Chinese aggression will divert attention to itself.
Over the next few years, the United States may not face a single war, let alone two or three. Even seasoned autocrats are not so frivolous as to run into a conflict with a superpower. This will require a good strategy and, for sure, luck.
Hal Brands is an American historian. Professor of World Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies, Senior Researcher at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies. He is also the author of several books: "The Latin American Cold War" (Latin America's Cold War, 2010), "Creating a Unipolar Moment of Power: US Foreign Policy and Increasing the Role of Order after the Cold War" (Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order, 2016), "American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump" (American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump, 2018). He graduated from Stanford University and received a doctorate in history from Yale University.
