Mara Karlin
Every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions,” the defense theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the early nineteenth century. There is no doubt that Clausewitz was right. And yet it is surprisingly difficult to characterize war at any given moment in time; doing so becomes easier only with hindsight. Harder still is predicting what kind of war the future might bring. When war changes, the new shape it takes almost always comes as a surprise.
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, American strategic planners faced a fairly static challenge: a Cold War in which superpower conflict was kept on ice by nuclear deterrence, turning hot only in proxy fights that were costly but containable. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought that era to an end. In Washington during the 1990s, war became a matter of assembling coalitions to intervene in discrete conflicts when bad actors invaded their neighbors, stoked civil or ethnic violence, or massacred civilians.
After the shock of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, attention shifted to terrorist organizations, insurgents, and other nonstate groups. The resulting “war on terror” pushed thinking about state-on-state conflict onto the sidelines. War was a major feature of the post-9/11 period, of course. But it was a highly circumscribed phenomenon, often limited in scale and waged in remote locations against shadowy adversaries. For most of this century, the prospect of a major war among states was a lower priority for American military thinkers and planners, and whenever it took center stage, the context was usually a potential contest with China that would materialize only in the far-off future, if ever.
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