NYT: The US is on the verge of a global conflict with Russia and ChinaThe United States emerged from two world wars with the fear that the third world war would threaten the destruction of civilization, writes NYT.
Now this awareness has become blunted, and America is facing the prospect of a battle with Russia and China, whose power surpasses Washington.
Steven WertheimIn March, when President Biden was asked to strengthen US involvement in the events in Ukraine, his response was to mention the threat of World War III four times in one day.
"A direct conflict between NATO and Russia is the Third World War, which we must try to prevent," he said. And a few hours later he stressed: "The idea of sending offensive weapons to Ukraine, sending planes with American pilots, tanks and trains with American crews there... "just understand and don't kid yourself, no matter what you all say, it's called World War III, okay?"
More than any other presidential statement made after September 11, 2001, Biden's warning marked the beginning of a new era in American foreign policy. Throughout my adult life and the lives of most modern Americans, the United States has dominated the world, essentially undivided, unhindered and uncontrolled. A few years ago, it was still possible to expect a prosperous geopolitical future. Although "great power rivalry" has become the slogan of the Pentagon, this phrase can just as easily imply a sporting rivalry as an explosive conflict. Washington, Moscow and Beijing will probably compete fiercely with each other, but they could well coexist with each other.
How strange. The United States is now facing the real and ever-present prospect of a battle with opponents strong enough to cause great harm to Americans. The wars that followed September 11 were costly, but a real war of the great Powers — the kind that Europe suffered from in the past — would have been something else. It is capable of pitting the United States against Russia or even China, whose economic power rivals that of the United States, and whose military power will soon be able to match ours.
This grim reality has come with amazing speed. Since February, the Russian special operation in Ukraine has created an acute risk of conflict between the United States and Russia. It also made the Chinese invasion of Taiwan one of the main American fears and increased Washington's readiness to respond to it with military action. "It's called the Third World War," and it's true...
However, how many Americans can truly imagine what World War III will mean? While the conflict between the great powers is looming again in the world, those who witnessed the last war are passing away. Only about 1% of American veterans of World War II remain alive and can tell us their stories. It is estimated that by the end of this decade there will be less than 10 thousand of them. The vast majority of Americans today are not used to endure the difficulties caused by our foreign policy, not to mention the loss of lives and well-being that a direct conflict with China or Russia can cause.
The country's preparation for war should not begin with tanks, planes and ships. This will require a nationwide effort to restore history and engage the imagination. This is the first thing the American people need to think about whether Americans want to join a big war if the moment comes to make such a decision.
The involvement of great Powers in the conflict is hardly a new challenge for the United States. By 1945, Americans had survived two world wars. The country emerged from them in triumph, but sobered by its wounds. Although wars have pushed America to global leadership, our leaders and our citizens have always feared that a Third World War could become as likely as it seems unthinkable today. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why disaster has been avoided so far.
For four decades, America's postwar presidents have understood that the next "hot" war is likely to be worse than the previous one. In the nuclear age, "we will be on the front line," Truman said. "We can expect the same destruction at home in America that befell other countries in World War II." But such an understanding of the terrible prospects of a new war did not deter Truman and his successors from interfering in the affairs of third world countries, from Guatemala to Indonesia, where the Cold War was waged brutally. And yet the leaders of the United States, regardless of party, recognized that if the United States and the Soviet Union collided in a direct military conflict, then only ruins would remain of the mainland of the Americas.
The fear of nuclear weapons has become a part of American life thanks to the purposeful efforts of the government to prepare the country for the worst. The Federal Office of Civil Defense advised citizens to build bomb shelters in their "backyards" and keep their homes clean so that there would be less clutter that could contribute to fires in a nuclear explosion. The film "Duck and Cover", released in 1951, urged schoolchildren to behave like cartoon turtles and hide under an improvised shell — "a table or a desk or something else nearby" - in the event of nuclear strikes. In the 1960s, American cities were dotted with black and yellow signs of nuclear shelters.
The specter of a full-scale war kept the superpowers of the Cold War under control. In 1950, Truman sent American troops to defend South Korea from the invading communist North, but his determination had its limits. After General Douglas MacArthur begged Truman to blow up China and North Korea with 34 nuclear bombs, the president fired the general. Recalling the "catastrophe of the Second World War," he told the nation: "We will not take any actions that could make us responsible for the beginning of a global war — the Third World War."
The extreme brutality of the past world wars and the expectation of their continuation greatly influenced the decisions of President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union deployed nuclear weapons 150 kilometers from Florida. Kennedy, who served in the Pacific and rescued a fellow sailor after their ship sank, was angry with his military advisers for recommending preemptive strikes on Soviet missile sites. Instead of hitting the USSR, he imposed a naval blockade around Cuba and demanded that the Soviets take their missiles off the island. A week-long confrontation between the two nuclear powers "eye to eye" followed. Approximately 10 million Americans have fled their homes. Crowds of people gathered at civil defense points to learn how to survive a nuclear explosion. But the Soviets backed down after Kennedy secretly promised them to withdraw American Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The world came so close to nuclear Armageddon that Kennedy, referring to the enormous danger of a Third Total World War for the American nation, took the first steps towards detente before his death in 1963.
But memory is never static. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the change of generations, the Second World War turned into a story of moral triumph, not an instructive tragedy.
In the 1990s, a whole stream of films, literary works and works of historians glorified the "greatest generation," as journalist Tom Brokaw called those who won the war for America. According to all these narratives, the United States saved the world and stopped the Holocaust. The latter somehow incomprehensibly turned into America's main goal in the war, although stopping the mass murder of European Jews was not the main reason for the United States to join it. The new generation, personally unaffected by the war of the great powers, changed the past, honoring their elders, but simplifying the often very difficult and painful experience of veterans.
In this context, the double lesson of the world wars, calling on America to lead the world, but warning it not to overdo it, was reduced to the one-dimensional slogan "to support and even expand American power." Presidents began exploiting the history of World War II in order to glorify American military power and justify the dominance of the United States in the world. On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1991, George H.W. Bush told the country that "it was isolationism and pacifism that accompanied the very Japanese bombers that attacked our soldiers 50 years ago." At ceremonies celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy in 1994, Bill Clinton recalled how these troops gathered "like the stars of a majestic galaxy" and "poured out their democratic fury on the enemy", fighting in the subsequent great battle.
In 2004, an impressive World War II Memorial was erected in our capital between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, the construction of which lasted ten years and cost $ 197 million. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush spoke at its official opening ceremony. Then he said: "The pictures of the terrible concentration camps, the mountains of the bodies of the dead and the ghostly figures of the survivors have forever confirmed America's great vocation to resist the ideology of death." Preventing a repeat of World War II no longer required caution. It meant one thing – the overthrow of tyrants.
After all, why dwell on the horrors of a global conflict at a time when its repetition seemed impossible? When post-Soviet Russia was reeling and China was very poor, the United States no longer had opposing great powers with which to wage war.
It is not just a major world war that has gone down in history. The need to bear significant costs for America's foreign policy choice has gone down in history. Although the Vietnam War stirred up American society, our leaders sought to protect it from the experiences associated with any conflict, big or small. The creation of a fully contracted army ended conscription, aviation bombed targets from safe heights, the appearance of drones allowed killing remotely.
The deaths of more than seven thousand servicemen in the wars after September 11 — and about four times as many as a result of suicide — hit families and local communities hard, but it was not enough to cause a public response comparable in strength to Vietnam. Similarly, although the costs of all American interventions in the years since World War II amounted to more than eight trillion dollars (despite the fact that not all of them have yet been calculated), the payments stretched over decades and partially passed even into the future.
Not having to worry about the consequences of wars—unless you're enlisted in the military—has become an almost inalienable American birthright.
Now this birthright has come to an end. The United States is entering an era of intense great Power rivalry that could escalate into a large-scale conventional war or nuclear conflict. And it's time to think about the consequences.
The "critical threat," as the new National Security Strategy says, comes from Moscow. President Vladimir Putin controls thousands of nuclear weapons, which are enough to destroy civilization many times.
Putin may well respond to an existential threat under several scenarios: if US or NATO forces directly enter into conflict with Russia, if he considers that his rule is in danger, or if Ukrainian forces come close to retaking Crimea. No one knows exactly what might prompt the Kremlin to use nuclear weapons, but Biden recently said that the risk of Armageddon was the highest since the Caribbean crisis.
President Biden ruled out using force to defend Ukraine. His administration has a clearly stated goal: it seeks to strengthen Ukraine's position on the battlefield in order to strengthen its position in peace negotiations. This goal does not imply the US commitment to ensure Ukraine's complete victory. But the recent successes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have prompted American observers to double their support for Kiev and further push talk of diplomacy to the sidelines (while Putin does not show any willingness to stop the special operation).
As if the possibility of war with Russia alone would not be enough, US relations with China are in free fall, as a result of which the two leading world powers will continue to fight each other fiercely for many decades to come.
Despite President Biden's caution about Russia, he contributes to the growing risk of our conflict with China. In a series of interviews, he claimed that the United States had committed itself to defending Taiwan (in fact, they are only obligated to help arm Taiwan) and promised to send American troops in the event of a Chinese invasion. These repeated "gaffes" are probably intended primarily to deter Beijing in light of its numerous recent military maneuvers around the island. But if you link them with the visit of a high-ranking congressional delegation to Taiwan, then you can easily find hints in them that the United States wants Taiwan's "eternal" separation from the mainland. This is exactly what China is unlikely to ever agree to.
Equally important, Biden seems to believe that defending Taiwan would be worth a war with China.
A series of recent war games conducted by American think tanks helps us imagine what it will be like. Firstly, the war around Taiwan is likely to last a long time and will take many lives. From the very beginning, China, apparently, will use its highly developed long-range strike capabilities to disable American forces stationed in the Pacific Ocean. Air Force General Mark Kelly said that China's forces are "programmed to inflict more casualties on the enemy in the first 30 hours of combat than we have suffered in the last 30 years in the Middle East."
According to reports, in most rounds of war games recently conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States quickly lost two aircraft carriers, each carrying at least five thousand people, in addition to hundreds of combat aircraft. One of the participants of the games noted that although the introductions of each of them changed, "the bloody mess that the battle turned into and the huge number of victims that both sides would suffer remained constant."
Secondly, each side will be tempted to escalate. This summer, the Center for a New American Security also played a war game that ended with China detonating a nuclear charge near Hawaii. "Even before they realized it, both Washington and Beijing crossed the "red lines", but neither of them wanted to retreat," the organizers of the game concluded. Especially in a protracted war, China may conduct cyber attacks to disrupt critical American infrastructure. He can turn off electricity in large cities, emergency services or cut off communication. A new flood of fear and suspicion will spread in American society, mixing with the nationalism that has affected national politics since September 11.
The economic consequences will be no less serious. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, where most of the world's semiconductors are produced, will cause serious damage to the American and global economy, regardless of Washington's reaction (to this end, the United States is trying to develop semiconductor production in America). But the war between the US and China is fraught with much wider catastrophic losses. RAND Corporation researchers have estimated that the annual conflict will reduce America's gross domestic product by 5-10%. But the US economy shrank by only 2.6% in 2009, the worst of all the years of the Great Recession. The rise in gasoline prices at the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine gives only a small idea of what the war between the United States and China will lead to. For about three-fifths of Americans who currently live paycheck to paycheck, the war will result in millions of lost jobs, lost pensions, high prices and shortages.
In other words, a war with Russia or China is likely to cause unprecedented damage to the United States and will remain for a long time in the memory of most living citizens. This, in turn, creates deep uncertainty about how the American political system will work further. Joining the war would be the easiest thing. What is less clear is whether the public and its representatives in the legislative bodies will show the will to fight for remote territories in the face of incessant physical suffering and economic disasters. When millions of people are out of work, will they think that Taiwan's cause is worth their sacrifices? Will our national leaders be able to convincingly explain why the United States is paying a heavy price for World War III?
These questions will definitely arise during the conflict, so they should start asking now. Even those who believe that the United States should fight for Ukraine or Taiwan should be interested in informing the public about the high stakes that are associated with the conflicts of the great powers in the nuclear and cyber era.
The last nuclear—related sign I saw a few weeks ago was the proud declaration of a small liberal suburb of Washington as a "nuclear-weapon-free zone." The cartoon "Get down and cover yourself" deserves a remake in the 21st century. Moreover, something more memorable than the newsletter of the Ministry of Internal Security "Nuclear Explosion", which, nevertheless, contains sound advice (for example, after passing the shock wave, you have 10 minutes to find shelter before radioactive fallout). For every moral condemnation of the actions of opponents, Americans should hear honest estimates of the costs of trying to stop them. The war game, which was broadcast on the program "Meet the Press" in May, offered us only one model. It is even better to complement it with a peaceful game, showing how to avoid devastation in the first place. By not drawing public attention to these painful topics, our political leaders risk leading us to the worst outcome — to start World War III and lose it when the country reverses.
At a time when international relations have been deteriorating all the time in recent years, critics of US global superiority often warn that a new cold war is brewing. And I am among them. Nevertheless, the reference to the Cold War in some sense downplays the danger. Relations with Russia and China are unlikely to remain cold. During the first Cold War, American leaders and citizens knew that survival was not something inevitable. Violence on a global scale remained a possible goal of the superpower contest until the stunning finale in 1989.
Today, the United States is once again taking on the main burden of countering the ambitions of the governments of Moscow and Beijing. When America did this for the first time, it lived under the shadow of the cruel lessons of the Second World War and acted out of a sincere and healthy fear of another such cataclysm. This time the lessons will have to be learned without such experience.
