Careful: The Next World War Could Start Small

We are now, once again, living in the preliminary phase of an international confrontation that will rapidly evolve into a world war if the democracies do not shore up nuclear and conventional deterrence against territorial conquest. 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 deterrence will not on its own prevent World War III (over either Ukraine, Taiwan, the Straits of Hormuz, or the Korean peninsula), just as the prospect of incendiary and nerve gas assault against European capitals by bomber fleets did not deter the outbreak of the Second World War. 

Instead, German leader Adolf Hitler chose to fight by armored conquest, and all of his adversaries complied. World Wars are never an intention of foreign policy. Instead, they escalate from failed attempts at a quick land grab by authoritarian states in the face of an unprepared and slowly coalescing democratic coalition. Washington must be on the lookout for deterrence crises in these minor theatres, as war will not start with an immediate Russian attack on Poland or even a direct Chinese amphibious landing on Taiwan’s coast.

Despite the enormous death toll among soldiers and non-combatants, neither the First nor Second World Wars had actually satisfied the complete definition of total war or reached Karl von Clausewitz’s definition of an absolute war. 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 that 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. 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. Still, there were absolutely no Nazi plans for defeating a USSR backed by U.S. industrial might.

While totalitarian propaganda could temporarily neutralize the German people’s reluctance to fight (11 million former Communist party voters still lived in Germany), Germany lacked the oil, food, and other resources necessary for an attritional contest. Hitler knew that given the political shock in Washington after the fall of France in June of 1940, it was only a matter of time before the United States 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, Germany had one more campaign season to neutralize the Soviet Union before it would face the fate of inevitable defeat.

Contrary to popular histories, the September 1939 French and British declarations of war against Germany in response to its invasion of Poland were not intended to herald the beginning of the Second World War. As with the dispute between Sparta and Athens over Corcyra, which was to escalate into the Peloponnesian War, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 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 aggressor states (those states most intent on replacing the status quo a new revisionist territorial, commercial and international institutional order). The mutual understanding between Germany and Hungary, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union (in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), as well as the persistent isolationism of U.S. public opinion, made Berlin feel that an attack on Poland was safe from the further widening of the conflict. Beijing may today hope that the Russian and Iranian distraction of Europe and the United States, respectively, would allow it to move against Taiwan.

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 to drastically enlarge German territory and population. Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping faces an existential threat to their countries. Still, 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 United States 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 United States with Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil (although the USSR did try and set up a strategic base in Cuba and Nicaragua during the Cold War). In this fashion, the United States has preoccupied India with Pakistan, China with Japan, Russia with Germany, Egypt with Israel, Iran with Saudi Arabia, Indonesia with Australia, and Thailand with Vietnam. It would, if required, back Argentina against Brazil, Angola against South Africa, Cote D’Ivoire against Nigeria, and Kenya against Tanzania and Ethiopia.

There are three necessary requirements for deterrence to succeed against escalating 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 trans-oceanic forces necessary for regional intervention in situations where a stability-instability paradox cancels out opposing nuclear arsenals. For example, the United States 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 or liberate it. This is currently being undermined by an isolationist-populist trend within U.S. politics, largely the consequence of the perceived abandonment of the blue-collar class by both the Democratic and mainstream Republic political parties. This is, in turn, the result of deindustrialization, contested immigration policy, and the genderization of the law and voting patterns.

Second, the democracies must form a credible alliance framework for mobilization. NATO and its partnership architecture are 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 a tactical nuclear war should be initiated at the East German border or the Rhine, indicate the lack of serious consideration of the implications of deterring China, Russia, and Iran. During the Cold War, Tehran was as hostile to Moscow as it was to the United States, 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.

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 who have been recognized by Canada’s intelligence service (CSIS) as colluding with hostile foreign powers. NATO membership is being used as a substitute rather than a focus of national defense efforts, as 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 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 has been focused 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 protection that made Beijing and Moscow feel safe to back the 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.