The Road to WWIII: How the US is Setting the Stage for Wars with Russia AND China
Has anyone noticed that we’re getting closer to starting wars with both Russia and China?
When we’ve been able to tear ourselves away from the dumpster fire over at United Airlines this week, we’ve been continually bombarded with the dueling narratives of chemical weapons in Syria, and nuclear ones in North Korea.
These two stories have both received mountains of coverage, but with one missing piece – there has been little to no discussion of the fact that these events are playing out at the same time.
An escalation in Syria gets us entangled with Russia and Iran, raising the possibility of the first ever world war between nuclear-armed superpowers. A conflict with North Korea does much the same thing, substituting in the Chinese.
Either scenario is terrifying by itself. But we aren’t trafficking in an either/or situation right now. We’re running dangerously close to a two front war against the largest powers in the world.
For perspective, let’s review the situation. Last week we launched $100 million worth of munitions into Syria. If that doesn’t sound like an act of warfare to you, then imagine your reaction if Iran were to drop 60,000 pounds of explosives onto New Hampshire and then describe it as an isolated event.
After the Syria attack, Russia and Iran have basically been daring Trump to do it again – stating that they will “respond with force” in such a circumstance. It’s unclear what the next steps are here, particularly if the President wants to demonstrate that America will not be intimidated.
While all that was going on, the US Navy sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the Korean peninsula. Trump tweeted out an overt provocation to back that up, stating “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” Pyongyang has made no bones about their views on all this, claiming that they will launch a preemptive nuclear strike to “obliterate” the US in response to any acts of aggression.
Any country with nuclear capabilities can cause destruction on a scale that we have deluded ourselves into believing is unrealistic. But the only reason that we haven’t removed the North Korean threat already is because the specter of colliding with China has been too disquieting to ignore. For better or worse, it would seem we’re past that now.
With tensions rising in multiple theaters, reports have emerged claiming that the consensus view among analysts is, as always, that the stakes are too high for any side to pull the pin out of the grenade. The trouble is, that was also the consensus view of analysts in the spring of 1914.
If you’ve never quite understood what exactly caused the so-called War to End All Wars, which lasted until 1918 and was the bloodiest horror show that humanity had ever seen up until that time, you aren’t alone. The trigger was a single act of violence, but the war happened because Europe was a strategic powder keg of complicated alliances and aggressive posturing that only needed a spark to blow nearly 20 million people into an early grave. A spark, and the fact that no one alive at the time really understood what would happen when great powers clashed with modern weaponry.
Wars don’t always happen on purpose. Most nations didn’t set out to start World War I, but it spiraled out of control and nobody knew how to stop it. There is no reason why the same thing couldn’t happen here. The more places we throw our weight around, the more risk we take.
A pervasive sense of American invulnerability makes us less concerned about this sort of thing that we might be. We spend more on defense than the next seven countries put together, and we haven’t had to fight on American soil for quite some time. But that is not a guarantee we never will. History does not exactly recommend two-front wars against major opponents, and transportation and technology these days makes it a lot easier to attack the US on our own turf than it ever was in previous conflicts.
It’s been more than 70 years since the United States has fought against a major power that can do the things that we can do. We’ve fought latter-day versions of tribal wars; we haven’t had to punch it out with fellow heavyweights. No large-scale war has ever been waged with today’s modern weaponry. No one should want to see what that looks like. Particularly not on two fronts. With this many fields of action, the odds of something going wrong only go up.
Even if the stakes are too high for anyone to consciously start an open war (a big “if”, with people like Kim Jong Un in the mix), we are on a razor’s edge right now. What would it take to escalate things faster than rational minds can control? A Russian rocket shooting down an American plane over the Syrian desert? A US strike in North Korea that kills Chinese military personnel by mistake? A soldier getting skittish and firing off his gun at the wrong time?
Most Americans aren’t aware of how often we’ve come to the brink of accidental nuclear catastrophe, but it should be obvious that we’re flirting with the line pretty aggressively here. And like the unfortunate souls who gave birth to industrial warfare a hundred years ago, we cannot really conceive of what we’re doing; common sense and intuition did not develop to internalize destruction on a nuclear scale.
However many times you hear it, the old Einstein quote still produces shivers. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Maybe we should put a little less faith in people making the right snap decisions once a crisis has already broken out, and cool things down while cooler heads still prevail.
