The Problem with Peace

This is difficult to write, as it may be overcome by events before it is ever read. Si vis pacem, para bellum.

The increasing pain and downside potential of what started as a limited, regional war in Ukraine between a second and a third-rate power include, as we've previously discussed:

• The backfiring Western economic sanctions against Russia;
• Massive military aid from NATO to faltering Ukraine, prolonging the war without changing its prospects for resolution;
• The crippling shutoff of Russian natural gas exports to Europe in response;
• Impending global foot shortages, as vital Russian and Ukrainian production and exports of grain and fertilizer flatline;
• Supply chain and economic impacts that are reshaping the world order;
• Acceleration and hardening of a new anti-Western bloc of Russian, China, Iran, and others based on a commonality of interests - the enemy-of-my-enemy argument. As nations and others pick sides, the lineup does not favor the West.

An underlying cause of all this is the historical illiteracy of the Western political elites, and their consequent sheer incompetence in matters of war and international conflict. As much as one might deplore Russian aggression against Ukraine, or China's bellicosity in the western Pacific, their leaders' focus upon their own critical national interests, and appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses, is in sharp contrast to the "woke" leadership of American and Western Europe.

One recalls a dated but too-true aphorism that the modern "liberal" cannot pick his own side in a fight. Likely because he's never been in fight, doesn't understand the dynamics of a fight, and learned no lessons, or the wrong lessons, from whatever shallow and politicized treatment of history he received in what passed for an "education".

Our military leadership, who in the past have served as loyal advisors in issues of war and national security, are no help in the present emerging crises. Above the rank of O-6 (colonel or naval captain), most of those who have not been ousted by the rolling purge or have not resigned/retired in disgust, are at best technicians without any strategic sense. Their formative experiences were occasional tactical or operational success and consistently misguided strategic failure since at least 1991. Name a war or "operation other than war" (as they say) that America has won, or even "ended favorably" or "exited" with honor intact, in the last thirty years.

That's the problem with "peace." The Cold War, which lasted from 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was not a peaceful era, but the nuclear balance between the US and USSR capped the scope and intensity of conflicts and kept those two superpowers from engaging directly in combat. Proxy wars were constant and overlapping, but never approached the intensity and cost of the two global wars of the first half of the 20^th Century. The Cold War was managed by the generation that fought the Second World War and understood the enormous consequences of global war under the new, nuclear conditions. It was a poor environment for raising the next generation of leaders who grew up either in the hang-fire world of nuclear deterrence, or the interminable stand-off along the Iron Curtain in Europe, or in escalation-capped, mostly third-world "small wars." The next thirty years, after 1991, were even worse.

The nation's war colleges, where promising field-grade officers get their ticket stamped for promotion to senior command positions, spent at least twenty years (2001-2021) as stateside rest & recuperation assignments during their one-year resident master's degree programs. Almost no one failed academically, and high grades went to promising officers who performed minimally. The very best excelled, but the majority did only what was necessary to finish the year with a degree. By pure disinterest and disengagement, these men and women learned very little in these programs about the pre-Cold War era of multi-polar shifting great power alliances. Nor did they learn much about nuclear weapons and strategy, since that has been a career dead-end in U.S. service since the early 1990s; officers in related career fields are at best engineers, pilots, missileers, and technicians. Both of those areas - historical and nuclear literacy - are critical for senior leaders, both civilian and military, today.

The brief, euphoric period of American "hyperpower" status that followed the collapse of the USSR is long gone. The world's population grew from 5.3 billion in 1990 to 8 billion in 2020, and economic interdependence (we could fairly say codependence) is far advanced. It is a multi-polar world of major and minor powers with shifting alliances and allegiances, and while the sheer number of nuclear weapons has fallen thanks to the late-Cold War arms reduction treaties, they are now in the hands of a larger number of nations with far less self-discipline (or imposed discipline) than was the case during the Cold War.

Even if we were to charitably assume the best of motivations, and discredit all the increasingly plausible theories of nongovernmental or super-governmental conspiracies with nefarious purpose, we could look far and wide to find national leaders, in America or its erstwhile "allies," who have a clue about how to handle the current crises.

Contrast this picture with the leadership of both Russia and China, the two major world powers where memories remain fresh and the calculus of interests is clear. Russia accepts authoritarian government by Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, Cold War veterans whose fathers' generation ensured that they would never forget the horrific cost (20-30 million dead) of Soviet victory in the Second World War, and whose loyalty is clearly and solely to the best interests of Russia - no "liberal internationalism," altruism, or multilateralism there. Quite unlike Russia, China has suffered under the continued rule of "evolving" communists who have not softened since they seized power in the late 1940s, but who instead display brutal pragmatism and pragmatic brutality combined with a single-minded focus on Chinese hegemony in East Asia and Western Pacific - if not the globe. These unfortunately are the two world powers with adults in charge, even if they are still as prone to miscalculation as any other leaders.

This week we have seen Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, which could not have been timed worse, or more poorly conceived. China is:

a. Militarily stronger than it has ever been;

b. Internally weakened and politically unstable;

c. Emboldened by Russia's success in the war in Ukraine;

d. Very aware of US military and economic weakness, and how unpopular and compromised the Biden administration is;

e. Deeply invested in more than a century of hatred for Japan, and 75 years of public commitment to the conquest and absorption of Taiwan.

At this worst of all possible times in the U.S.-China relationship, Pelosi was sent to Taiwan to poke the People's Republic of China in the eye with a sharp stick. Whether through malice or sublime incompetence of the Biden Administration, China is now on the brink of a war that would in days, and by any measure, dwarf all the damage and consequences of the last five months of fighting in Ukraine.

China's unprecedented August 8 military exercise of firing ballistic missiles over both Taiwanese and Japanese waters, territory, and airspace, and deploying large air and naval forces into what could, at a moment's notice, become a strangling blockade of Taiwan, has served notice. Other bouts of saber-rattling and intimidation have occurred over the years, but this has reached a new high.

Japan and Taiwan are both nuclear "breakout" stakes (much like Iran in the Middle East): with no declared nuclear weapons, but the ability to assemble and deploy them in a matter of days, weeks, or at most a few months from the decision to do so. Given U.S. weakness and lack of resolve since at least January of 2021, we can only wonder whether - or when - that decision has been made. We cannot even be confident that those weapons are not already in hand, and their presence known to the PRC. That moment, whether it comes now or next week or next month, could conceivably have a calming effect but it seems unlikely.

As previously noted, China will never have a better opportunity to launch its long-prepared war for the domination of Taiwan than now, even at the risk of a nuclear exchange. China's prospects will only become worse, the longer it waits; and the domestic economic and political weakness of the Xi regime will not allow significant delay. Two things that CCP leaders most likely (and correctly) believe is that the U.S. would not itself wage nuclear war to protect either Taiwan or Japan, and that any token U.S. military action in the Western Pacific could be easily absorbed and defeated.

China, for all its size and power, could be collapsed by as few as half a dozen nuclear detonations - Beijing, its major ocean ports, and the Three Gorges Dam. Nuclear devastation of Taiwan and/or Japan would likely follow. Consider the consequences:

• On the 20% of the world's population in those three countries alone;
• Direct and subsequent impacts across South Asia, through Southeast Asia and the Southern Pacific and north to Korea;
• The longer-term effect of radioactive fallout and contamination worldwide;
• The shredding of the already unstable global economy;
• The opportunistic exploitation of chaos that would likely occur in the Middle East, where Iran and Israel are already on the brink of full-scale and likely nuclear hostilities.

That's without any nuclear involvement by the United States, which seems unlikely from an administration so weak and so compromised in its relationship to China. However, the lessons of the past suggest that hubris, miscalculation, provocation, and incompetence are devils in the details in such a scenario, and exactly those risks are what no one in U.S. national leadership understands.

Even without nuclear weapons employed, a war over Taiwan now would have profound destructive impacts on the world.

If you have not already, ask what durable and expendable goods produced in the Western Pacific and on the East Asian mainland you cannot live without; and how you, your family, and your community would fare in a massive, extended food and energy crisis of unprecedented scale. Then act. Do it now.