“We’re a failed state,” Trump thundered during a particularly incoherent response (he also invoked the urban legend of immigrants eating cats) during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “And what the hell is going on? Moving on to another topic, you’re going to be in World War III.” Trump brought up the subject more than once. “We’re going to be in World War III,” he concluded. “And it’s going to be a war like no other we’ve ever had before because of nuclear weapons.”
Oh, man. Let’s just speculate about the next four years of cat-eating for America and the world. Unfortunately, we can’t, because even the experts are increasingly concerned about the new threat of a major world war.
They will do so for at least three reasons. First, there is the possibility of a proliferation of particularly violent regional wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and further wars erupting from the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to the Korean Peninsula. Second, the direct or indirect aggressors in these conflicts – Russia, Iran, China and North Korea – may increasingly behave like an “axis” and coordinate attacks against the United States or its allies. Third, it’s all about nuclear: Russia has roughly as many nuclear warheads as the United States, China is racing to equal both, North Korea is growing its nuclear arsenal, and Iran is very close to building its own.
So the risks go beyond campaign hype. But what should the US do? Prepare for World War III? That seems like the smart thing to do, if World War III is coming anyway. But doing so could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it could be so costly that the US might have to sacrifice its prosperity in the process.
Government officials in Washington – the Pentagon, Congress, think tanks, etc. – tend to wrap such existential debates in language that ordinary people can’t understand, so that we don’t all panic. That means paying particular attention to dry terms like “force structure.” This refers to the government’s definition of what the U.S. military should be able to do, specifically how many wars it can fight and win simultaneously. The government first began formulating a clear answer to this question just after the Cold War, usually buried deep in Pentagon documents. At the time, Russia didn’t seem much of a threat, and China wasn’t yet. The U.S. was a de facto superpower and explicitly adopted a force structure that allowed it to win two regional wars simultaneously (e.g., in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula) while simultaneously putting out smaller “wildfires” elsewhere (e.g., in the Balkans). This two-war strategy remained doctrine for two decades. But by the time of Barack Obama’s administration, the United States had been exhausted by the twin debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan (where the enemy was not even a “close ally,” in technical terms), and the force structure was rewritten to win one major war while holding back other enemies (without fighting them).
Experts have called this new concept tongue-in-cheek names: 1 War, 1+, 1.5 (why not the square root of 3?), but the change is in keeping with a new era of more modest ambitions abroad. Both Trump and Joe Biden have maintained the strategy, speaking in policy documents of “defeating” one great power and “deterring” the other.
Now the winds have shifted again. Scholars are calling for a “three-theater” strategy to fight and win in Europe, the Middle East and Asia simultaneously. The National Defense Strategy Commission, appointed by Congress to oversee the Pentagon’s vision, goes even further, calling for a military that can simultaneously defeat China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, while also crushing terrorist groups. By my calculations, that’s a 4.5 war strategy.
Our dilemma is that none of these options are good. The obvious drawback to the one-war concept is that the United States may have to fight in multiple “theaters” whether it wants to or not, as in World War II. And if the United States is only prepared for one theater, it may lose in the others.
Worse yet, insisting on one war may actually encourage an enemy to become more aggressive if it believes the United States is already distracted on another front. For example, let’s say the United States is fighting China in the Taiwan Strait. North Korea might decide that now is an opportune time to attack South Korea. Generally speaking, the United States cannot credibly claim to remain a world leader with alliances and commitments in many places if it is only prepared to fight in one place.
One flaw with the three wars (or 4.5 wars) vision is that the United States cannot afford it. Washington is in one budget crisis after another (October is just around the corner), and interest on the government debt is already exceeding military spending. Are Americans prepared to pay two or three times the defense share of GDP that it did during the Cold War? Even the National Defense Strategy Commission acknowledges that the vision would require big tax increases and deep cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
BloombergAn even bigger drawback is that a three-war policy would create a “spiral” known in international relations as the “security dilemma.” The term was coined in 1950 to describe a situation in which one country (in this case the United States) feels threatened and builds up its military, which in turn prompts an adversary (say China) to build up its military even more, which further frightens the United States. This logic applies to both conventional and nuclear war. Not good.
The go-to escape route in these increasingly dystopian war games is the word “allies.” The U.S. can’t deter or defeat global bad guys alone, so it needs help from its friends. So NATO’s European nations must shore up their defenses against Russia. And Japan, Australia, and other Asian allies need to get ready to take on China. All these armies, navies, air forces, and space forces must work together, supply each other with interoperable weapons (so everyone can load and repair them), and fight with one strategy.
This is no modest proposal. It would require overcoming stiff domestic opposition in capitals from Berlin to Canberra to Tokyo and would require an entirely new worldview. Allies have long assumed the United States would come to their rescue, but they do not expect the United States to come to their rescue. It also presupposes unprecedented upheaval in Washington’s complex defense procurement and planning bureaucracy, which impedes cooperation with foreign partners at every step.
Based on what we know about Trump, even bringing up the topic of improving America’s relations with its allies disqualifies him from being president. Trump doesn’t see his foreign partners as brothers fighting alongside him to keep the peace or win wars, but rather in a petty transactional spirit, treating them more like a used car salesman welcoming walk-ins.
But if Trump has no answers, then neither does Harris, at least for now. And what may be most frightening about this week’s debate is that, in his fits of fevered loquacity, Trump inadvertently raised a risk that not just the United States but all of us need to discuss.
