FRANCIS P. SEMPA
The great historian Victor Davis Hanson titled his book on World War II The Second World Wars because the conflicts that evolved into that global war began as separate wars: Japan versus China; Italy versus Ethiopia; Japan versus Soviet Russia; Soviet Russia and Germany versus Poland; Soviet Russia versus Finland; England and France versus Germany; Italy versus France; Germany versus Soviet Russia; Japan versus the United States and England; and Germany and Italy versus the United States. Similarly, in 1912 fighting broke out in the Balkans; then Austria-Hungary went to war against Serbia; Germany declared war on Russia; Russia waged war on Austria-Hungary; Germany attacked Belgium and France, and England declared war on Germany. Later, Italy and the United States joined the war. Those conflicts also evolved into a global war waged on five continents, on the high seas, and in the air.
Writing in his 1919 geopolitical masterpiece Democratic Ideals and Reality, Sir Halford Mackinder noted that “[W]e have had a world war about every hundred years for the last four centuries.” Some historians identify the Seven Years War (1756≠1763) as the first global conflict — a war that began on the North American Continent between Britain and France (we know it as the French and Indian War) and spread to continental Europe and beyond. The wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815) likewise began as separate wars between Britain and France and spread throughout continental Europe and on the high seas.
There was nothing inevitable about those separate regional conflicts spreading to other parts of the globe. Statesmen and political leaders made decisions that collectively led to global wars. Few could have imagined that skirmishes in western Pennsylvania in 1754 would set the continent of Europe ablaze two years later, and that the fighting would last until 1763. No one foresaw that France’s revolution in 1789 would produce wars for the next 25 years. None of Europe’s late-19th century statesmen, with the exception of Bismarck, imagined sparks from the Balkans igniting four years of total war. Likewise, it was only Winston Churchill and a handful of other observers in the 1930s who sensed that a rearmed Germany and militaristic Japan could engulf the world in its most terrible and tragic war.
Today, we see separate wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and a gathering storm in the western Pacific. Russia is at war with Ukraine, which is being aided by NATO countries, including the United States. Iran through proxies (Hamas and Hezbollah) and now directly is waging war against Israel, which is being aided by the United States and other countries. China, like Germany in Europe the 1930s, is increasingly aggressive in the western Pacific, repeatedly threatening and pressuring Taiwan, which is supported by the United States, Japan, and other nations in the region. Respected scholars and observers of international politics express concerns that these separate conflicts may evolve into World War III.
The countries involved in these separate conflicts include the nuclear armed powers of Russia, the United States, France and England (as part of NATO), China, Israel, and possibly Iran. That fact should focus the minds of the political leaders of these countries, but there are other factors involved that could trump the fears of nuclear war. Iran’s leaders and their proxies are committed to the destruction of Israel. Russia views Ukraine as a wayward province. China sees control of Taiwan as the unfinished business of the Communist Revolution. The United States is committed to maintaining the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. Thucydides famously wrote that wars are produced by fear, honor, and interest.
But statesmen must be reminded that global war is not inevitable. The policies and decisions of political leaders — not historical inevitability — will determine the outcome of these conflicts and whether the world is engulfed in a more terrible war than the Second World War. It is in times like these that stability and order must take precedence over anything else, including democracy promotion and ideological campaigns against “autocracy.” Cooler heads must prevail or we all will suffer the consequences.
This doesn’t mean appeasement — which history teaches can lead to war instead of preventing it. But it also doesn’t mean unbridled belligerence, which can transform separate regional wars into global catastrophes. What the United States needs today are statesmen of the caliber of Bismarck or Disraeli, John Quincy Adams or Count Sergei Witte, Metternich or Castlereagh, Nixon or Kissinger. Alas, you will find none among the Biden national security team, who have for three years prioritized climate change, diversity, equity and inclusion, and a Wilsonian approach that emphasizes feel-good ideology over global order and stability.
It would benefit all of the statesmen involved in today’s separate conflicts to read Robert Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind, which teaches that in international politics order and stability are the highest values, that there are no final solutions to international rivalries, that diplomacy must often aim at accepting lesser evils instead of perfect or ideal outcomes, that Utopian notions of universal freedom and liberty are chimeras, and that a sense of the tragic — which comes from knowledge of both history and great literature — is an indispensable element of prudent statecraft.
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