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The world now faces a wide range of potential wars and crises. What is far less obvious is the full level of confrontation that has developed between the U.S. and its strategic partners and Russia, the similar level of confrontation with China, and rising other types of violence and potential conflict that are emerging on a global level.
The Emeritus Chair in Strategy at CSIS has prepared a detailed net assessment that explores these rising levels of risk and confrontation, and the kind of futures that may emerge out of these different crises, confrontations and conflicts, and trends. It focuses on the current level of political, economic, and military risks that shape the world in the winter of 2022-2023, but also examines key strategic trends and military developments.
It is entitled A World in Crisis: The “Winter Wars” of 2022-2023. A downloadable copy is attached at the bottom of this page and the net assessment can be found on the CSIS webpage at https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/221215_Winter_War_Update.pdf?DYU6shuC3R3yFDMGKqeFQPzT5x53pPzN
The assessment shows that war does not have to mean actual military conflict between the nations involved. Avoiding or minimizing actual combat has never meant peace. As Sun Tzu pointed out in the Art of War well over 2,000 years ago, “war” does not have to involve the use of military force or any form of actual combat. His statement that, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” reflected many of the conflicts in China in his own time. It has applied to other states and cultures throughout history, and it applies to many of the confrontations and grey area conflicts that exist today.
The first part of this net assessment focuses on the level of confrontation between the major powers – the U.S. and its strategic partners, Russia, and China in the near to mid-term. It shows that this confrontation has grown far more serious in the last few years and now affects many areas of the globe. It also shows that many aspects of this confrontation are now the equivalent of Sun Tzu’s goal of subduing the enemy without fighting. The confrontations and rivalries between the major powers have become the equivalent of political and economic warfare and competing efforts to use military power to achieve strategic objectives without direct combat.
The second part of the net assessment makes it equally clear that the wide range of lower-level crises and conflicts between regional and local powers, and civil wars and lesser internal conflicts are intensifying.
In far too many cases, the assessment shows all too clearly that the world is not moving towards peace. The world faces a series of possible and ongoing “winter wars” in 2022-2023 that may or may not escalate to open military conflict, but that are already wars at a political and economic level. Many of these “winter wars” also involve efforts to build up more lethal military forces, use security assistance and arms transfers, or proxies to exert political and economic leverage while deterring them from using force in actual fighting.
The list of such wars – violent or non-violent that are ongoing in the winter of 2020-2023, and that seem likely to continue to affect global security in the future, includes:The “Winter War” in Ukraine
The “Winter War” between the West and Russia in Economics, Politics, and Energy
The “Winter War” in Conventional Force Modernization and Build-Ups by the U.S., NATO and Russia.
The “Winter War” in Nuclear Forces and Deterrence Between the Major Powers,
The “Winter War” in Precision Strike Capabilities, Air/Missile Defense and Emerging/Disruptive Technologies
The “Winter War” in Going from Cooperation and Competition with China to Confrontation and Active War Planning
The “Winter War” in the Middle East and the Gulf
The “Winter War” in the Koreas
The “Winter War in Grey Area, Spoiler, and Proxy Warfare
The “Winter War” in Fragile, Divided, Authoritarian, and Undeveloped States
The following table of contents for this net assessment examines how the major powers are conducting such “wars” and the threats they pose. Using an extensive mix of graphs, chart, and maps, the data show that new forms of political and economic warfare – and military build-ups – increasingly divide the world’s major powers.
At the same time, the analysis shows that other states are increasingly involved in similar forms of regional and local conflicts or are becoming involved in the confrontation between major powers. It also shows that many such states lack effective governance and adequate economic development and are moving towards new internal, local, and regional conflicts. Desirable as some form of stable globalism may have seemed in the past, this net assessment shows that the world is moving in a very different direction.
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