By Hal Brands
Imagine a scenario in which, a year or two or three from now, the world is shaken by war from Europe to the Pacific. The idea isn’t as absurd as you may think. Not in decades has the US faced such prospects of near-term military confrontation in several separate theaters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ignited Europe’s largest conflict in generations and provoked a great-power proxy fight. In East Asia, the chances of war are growing, as the tensions precipitated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August demonstrated. In the Middle East, the US may have to choose between fighting Iran and accepting it as a nuclear threshold state.
Put these crises together and you have the makings of a Eurasian World War.
Nightmare scenarios usually don’t materialize, of course. It is possible that none of these situations will pull the US into war, and the most plausible timelines toward conflict vary by region.
But the thought exercise demonstrates just how pervasive the danger of major war has become. It also reminds us that today’s crises are more deeply interrelated than they appear.
America’s enemies may not be formally allied, but they are aligned in a critical area — the Eurasian heartland — and in critical ways. An overstretched US cannot react to one problem without considering the impact on its ability to deal with others.
The demands on American statecraft will be severe, as Washington confronts an array of problems it can’t easily walk away from and certainly can’t afford to see escalate all at once.
In some ways, America’s predicament resembles the period before World War II. Leave aside that no US rival has committed aggression or atrocity on the scale of the Axis powers — although China’s repression of its people and Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine are haunting echoes of that past.
Leave aside, also, that Putin’s brutal bumbling in Ukraine presently looks more like an imitation of Benito Mussolini than of Adolf Hitler. The basic patterns of geopolitics look painfully familiar.
Then as now, the international system was being battered from many directions.
Japan was seeking dominance in the Far East. In July of 1940 the United States imposed an embargo on all exports of aviation fuel, iron and scrap steel to Japan. The Japanese continue to expand into French Indo-China and the United States responded by imposing a complete embargo on the export of all grades of iron and scrap iron.
Japan now signed an agreement with Germany and Italy. This provided that the three powers would assist each other with all political, economic, and military means if one of them were attacked. Sound familiar folks?
Roosevelt now froze all Japanese assets in the United States and enforced a trade embargo. The greatest loss to Japan was the inability to get oil; they imported 80% of their oil from the US. They could fix this problem though, by expanding into the Dutch East Indies, which had huge oil fields.
FDR’s final step was to move our Pacific fleet from its base in San Diego, to a new base of operations, Pearl Harbor. Not at all unlike our current situation of Biden increasing our military presence in Central Europe.
Japan now decides to attack the United States. Is this what Russia and China are currently contemplating?
Hitler’s Germany was bidding for control in Europe and beyond. Mussolini’s Italy was making a bloody push for empire in the Mediterranean and Africa.
The Soviet Union would ultimately end up fighting Hitler — but only after helping him carve up Eastern Europe.
There was little affection among these revisionist states. The differing racist ideologies that motivated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were fundamentally incompatible.
Although Berlin, Rome and Tokyo did sign their Tripartite Pact in 1940, multidirectional mistrust ensured that this was little more than a loose agreement to blow up the existing order and build separate empires amid the rubble.
Yet if the Axis powers made cynical partners, there was a deep, destructive synergy among the programs of radical expansion they pursued.
The dictators supported each other at critical moments: Mussolini’s backing aided Hitler’s bloodless conquest of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938.
Advances by one fascist power emboldened the others: Germany’s romp through Western Europe in 1940 helped persuade Japan to push into Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the expense of a defeated France, a desperate Britain and a distracted America.
Then as now, a democratic great-power facing trouble everywhere struggled to act decisively anywhere. During the late 1930s, Britain hesitated to draw a hard line against Germany while facing simultaneous threats from Italy and Japan.
The US had similar problems amid worsening crises in Europe and Asia. “I simply have not got enough Navy to go round,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941.
Even wartime mobilization didn’t fully solve this problem. From beginning to end, a fight against multiple antagonists forced the Allies to make agonizing trade-offs. It didn’t take a fully integrated alliance of totalitarian adversaries to throw the democracies off balance — and create the gravest, most generalized crisis of global security the world has seen.
In the 1930s, Western leaders struggled to foresee how quickly regional crises could cause a global meltdown.
It’s not news that autocratic powers have been building up their militaries and coercing their neighbors. What is new is that all these challenges are threatening to turn violent.
Eastern Europe is aflame thanks to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the culmination of a generation-long campaign to restore Russian primacy from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea.
A successful blitzkrieg back in February might have given Russia a commanding position in Eastern Europe and invited new oppression of exposed North Atlantic Treaty Organization states.
Russian blunders and Ukrainian resistance averted that scenario. But even a diminished Russia will have plenty of ability to make trouble, and the Ukraine conflict is far from over.
Both Ukraine and Russia have ambitious aims.
Kyiv seeks the liberation of all occupied territory, including Crimea; Moscow aims to turn Ukraine into an impoverished, vassal state. The war has also unleashed a ferocious contest in great-power coercion.
Washington and its allies are giving Ukraine guns, money and intelligence to bleed Putin’s army; they are battering the Russian economy through sanctions. Moscow has used energy coercion to make the war more painful for Europe; it has threatened nuclear escalation in hopes of limiting its losses on the battlefield by limiting Western support for Ukraine.
Putin seems to believe he can coerce his enemies into quitting before he suffers a major defeat, while the US is acting as though it can deter Putin from escalating long enough for Ukraine to prevail.
The result of all this is a violent, unstable equilibrium, one that cannot hold forever as committed participants pursue irreconcilable goals.
Meanwhile, the countdown to conflict may have begun in the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing used Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as pretext for aggressive military exercises that foretell a higher baseline of regional tension. Chinese officials surely prefer to achieve their goals — controlling Taiwan and pushing the US out of the Western Pacific — without a major war.
It is possible that Putin’s bloody mess in Ukraine has made Chinese President Xi Jinping more cautious about using force. Yet a three-decade military buildup has undoubtedly given Xi a far better shot at subduing Taiwan if he chooses.
In fact, Xi may have to use force to get what he wants: The odds of Taipei peacefully submitting to a totalitarian China decrease each year, while the US and its allies appear increasingly intent on blocking Beijing’s bid for regional dominance.
President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, recently said that the US is in “the early years of a decisive decade” in its competition with Beijing.
There is vigorous debate in Washington over when the threat of Chinese aggression will become most critical; even the most worried observers think a showdown is at least two to three years away.
Yet the risk of war is rising as China’s determination to upend the East Asian balance smacks into its rivals’ determination to uphold it.
Then there is the perpetually flammable Middle East, a region Americans would love to ignore. The ongoing, intermittently violent contest between Washington and Tehran nearly exploded in 2019 and early 2020, after a sequence beginning with US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement and culminating with the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.
Iran’s advances in uranium enrichment have reportedly given it the ability to make a nuclear weapon in short order. The US and Israel must therefore consider whether more coercive methods are needed to prevent Iran from crossing this red line. A crisis could come quickly — in months — if negotiations to revive the nuclear agreement conclusively fail.
War between the US and its rivals is not inevitable in any of these theaters. It is a distinct possibility in all of them.
When multiple regions implode at once, they can bring the global order crashing down. Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia collectively form the strategic core of the larger theater — Eurasia — that has been the focal point of global politics in the modern era. By sowing upheaval within their regions, the revisionists are shaking several pillars of the system at once.
Simply by pursuing their own agendas, moreover, they create openings for the others to exploit. Feverish tensions with China and Russia force Washington to tread carefully with Iran. Biden’s administration must be wary of provoking Xi while it is tangling with Putin.
To be sure, America’s rivals are uncertain friends. Xi hasn’t rescued Putin from his quagmire in Ukraine; if China, Russia and Iran did push the US out of Eurasia, they might fall out among themselves. But none can accomplish its aims without successfully confronting a superpower, which gives them an overriding incentive to align.
Americans may not see the China-Russia relationship as an alliance, but that’s mostly because it lacks the explicit mutual-defense guarantees that have characterized US alliances since World War II.
Even so, the relationship has many attributes of an alliance: arms sales and military exercises; growing ties in defense technologies; cooperation to maintain autocratic stability in Central Asia.
It also involves a tacit non-aggression pact that frees Beijing and Moscow to focus on the US rather than worrying about each other. A crucial reason the risk of war is growing on both sides of Eurasia is that America’s two great-power adversaries can now fight “back to back.”
Iran is not in the same weight class as Russia and China, but it is part of this loose revisionist axis. Russia and Iran fought together to save Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, while China helped run interference at the UN Security Council.
China and Russia have periodically shielded Tehran from US pressure, delaying or diluting sanctions and selling Iran arms.
This cooperation is becoming more pointed. Tehran conducted trilateral naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing after its tensions with Washington spiked in 2019; signed a 25-year strategic partnership with China in 2021; and provided Russia with hundreds of military drones for use in Ukraine.
Tehran’s assistance to Russia underscores something vital: China may not want to get involved in Ukraine. Yet if Xi feared that Russia was nearing a military collapse that could cause a political collapse in Moscow, he might feel pressure to provide economic aid and military supplies despite the threat of American wrath.
Don’t expect Russia, Iran and China to commit suicide for one another, but don’t think they will be indifferent to one another’s fate.
Once again folks, history is repeating itself.