The West must endure by adapting its basic principles of defence
No one wants a global conflict, but in some ways we may already be in World War III without being aware of it. The war between Russia and Ukraine, the largest conventional conflict the world has seen since World War II, is having global effects. These effects have necessarily impacted on parts of the world where Russia, China, European powers and the United States have interests, which is in fact the entire international system. None of the conflicts analysed is separate from the others; like the different theatres of operation in World War II, each has an effect on the balance of power and threat in the other regions.
The nebulous period known as the Post-Cold War has developed through progressive instability, leading to conflicts involving major powers or confrontation between them through the use of ‘proxies’. Two basic questions arise as to the causes: the loss of deterrence and the loss of Western power and influence in just one generation. Skilled and mature statesmen will be needed to avoid an even greater conflict in 2025, but in this day and age there is a severe deficit of skilled statesmen.
A difficult time for global affairs
The past three years have seen Russia's second invasion of Ukraine, Hamas attack Israel, the Houthis threaten maritime trade in the Indian Ocean with military action, Iran launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel, Assad was ousted from Syria and tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait. A new development is the presence of North Korean army units in Ukraine.
The world that has served as a reference point up to now is crumbling and the regional balances of power in Europe, the Middle East and Asia are no longer in place. If this scenario is viewed from a geostrategic perspective, an alliance hostile to the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia can be identified, in which China, Russia, Iran and North Korea form a new ‘Axis of dictatorship’ in which they rapidly and strongly support each other, as evidenced by the economic support and supply of arms, ammunition and military units to Russia in the war in Ukraine. The ‘Axis’ is born with a universal vocation, as its contacts with the Global South demonstrate.
The dilemma of the rules-based order
During the Cold War, the nature of the situation led Western national security analysts to think in terms of polarities, a system that was discarded in the post-Cold War period in favour of the constructivist dogma that US primacy was exercised through the ‘rules-based order’ structure of neoliberal economic orthodoxies, which acted as a catalyst for globalisation.
The attempt at the process began in the 90s of the twentieth century by integrating Moscow into the ‘status quo’ by offering it a place at the table. China, in turn, would assume its future role as a ‘responsible actor in the international system’. The ideal ‘status quo’, a consequence of the assumed ‘victory’ in the Cold War, collapsed on 9/11. This event served as a yawning yawn before the awakening of historical truth, which came into action showing what the reality of a revanchist imperial power is: above all else it is to have its own throne. To this must be added the fact that any power with the social capacity to modernise and industrialise quickly and invariably mutates into assertive geostrategic action in the international context: China.
While in the new century Washington was engaged in secondary theatrics to pursue the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) conflict, tendentious adversaries were building military capabilities and preparing for deployments in pursuit of geopolitical superiorities in the Atlantic, Pacific and beyond. The West's voluntarist strategy, rather than strengthening deterrence in key theatres, is likely to be the vehicle used to preach ‘emerging multipolarity’, as if de facto appeasement might induce revisionists to change course.
A return to the past
Prestigious strategists warn that we live in a context of similarities to the 1930s. Today we find ourselves in a geopolitical environment reminiscent of the 1930s, where the overall balance of power is becoming less and less stable, masking deterrence in the trend towards a multi-theatre system.
Although it is typical of historians to assign precise dates to the outbreak of wars, the reality is that the Second World War did not begin when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. It began abruptly and sequentially as precarious regional balances began to crumble rapidly: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, the Anschluss of Austria and the break-up of Czechoslovakia.
Today, as in the run-up to that global conflict, we find ourselves in a world that is beginning to be defined as one of ‘protracted systemic instability’. Continued deterrent failures over the past two decades of appeasement, beginning with Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia after Germany and France blocked President George W. Bush's initiative to invite Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, make it more difficult to repair the damage done.
Over the past decade, Western ‘leaders’ seem to have forgotten that appeasement is the opposite of deterrence, the effect of which is the inability of the enemy to act due to a willingness to employ capabilities beyond those of the deterred. Russia, since 2008, has resorted to the use of military capabilities in its foreign policy: when it seized Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, in 2014 when it invaded Crimea and separated it from Ukraine, a year later when it sent its forces into Syria, and then in 2022 with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Each time, it won a political victory, suffering only marginal consequences until 2022, when the US and NATO reacted, but without a strategy for victory and with escalation management as a priority mode of action.
If the new administration in Washington abandons the Western bloc, or European allies start designing their contribution to it by enabling a multinational actor, the uncertainty that the situation would generate will not allow for a Western geostrategic design. It is time to return to realism in Western security policy, putting hard power considerations and geopolitics at the forefront.