The history of mankind is a history of war. The history we are taught, the history of humanity, is punctuated by wars. Our country, the United States, was shaped in large part by major wars: The Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Great War, and World War 2. It's this way for every nation, everywhere, at all times.
In recorded history, major societies have suffered major wars with amazing regularity; the current state of affairs, 80 years without a global war, is remarkable. If the post-1945 20th century had followed the pattern of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, the world would be a very different place today.
Are we overdue for a major conflict? A recent piece at the Foreign Affairs website, by Graham Allison and James A. Winnefeld, Jr, raises just that question, and they make some interesting points.
Three numbers capture the defining features—and successes—of the international security order: 80, 80, and nine. It has been 80 years since the last hot war between great powers. This has enabled the global population to triple, life expectancy to double, and global GDP to grow 15-fold. If, instead, post–World War II statesmen had settled for history as usual, a third world war would have occurred. But it would have been fought with nuclear weapons. It could have been the war to end all wars.
I should note that Mr. Allison and Mr. Winnefeld are rather more optimistic than I am.
What's not mentioned here is the Cold War, which some historians claim actually was the third world war, fought mostly on economic fronts and smaller proxy wars, like the Vietnam conflict. This economic conflict brought down the Soviet Union, which was the Western world's primary geopolitical rival in the post-WW2 era. The Soviet Union's poor economic system, communism, didn't create wealth on the scale needed to have, as the saying goes, both "guns and butter." The Politburo, being perfectly comfortable themselves, went all-in for the guns side of the equation, leaving much of their population in misery.
Came 1981, with Ronald Reagan entering the White House, it was apparent that the United States could sustain a military buildup and still maintain a prosperous civil economy. Reagan wielded this to force the Soviet Union to try to keep up, and eventually, broken by an economic conflict they could no longer afford, the Soviet Union collapsed.
But that wasn't the end of history, much as many may have thought at the time.
It has also been 80 years since nuclear weapons were last used in war. The world has survived several close calls—most dangerously the Cuban missile crisis, when the United States faced off with the Soviet Union over nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba and during which President John F. Kennedy estimated the odds of nuclear war to be between one in three and one in two. More recently, in the first year of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, which began in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin seriously threatened to conduct tactical nuclear strikes. According to reporting in The New York Times, the CIA estimated the odds of a Russian nuclear strike to be 50-50 if Ukraine’s counteroffensive were about to overrun retreating Russian forces. In response, CIA director Bill Burns was dispatched to Moscow to convey American concerns. Fortunately, imaginative collaboration between the United States and China dissuaded Putin, but it served as a reminder of the fragility of the nuclear taboo—the unstated global norm that the use of nuclear weapons should be off the table.
Nuclear weapons exist. They will never be "off the table." Not completely. It's only a matter of determining what extremes a nation may be driven to that would make their use of nuclear weapons seem worthwhile.
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China and Russia are America's primary geopolitical rivals today. Both are nuclear powers. Russia has its eye on Eastern Europe, which may bump it up against NATO nations, including Poland, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia - all nations once within the Iron Curtain. China wants to take Taiwan back, and has been acting with increasing aggressiveness towards Japan - a key American Pacific ally - and the Philippines. Both nations have, in the last 20 years or so, grown increasingly aggressive. Both are experimenting with new military technologies, from hypersonic missiles to drone swarms. Both are, as noted, nuclear powers. And both are facing serious, possibly civilization-ending demographic crises. The demographic problem may be insurmountable, and unless some solution is in the offing, in another two, maybe three generations, Russia and China may not exist in anything like their current form.
Wars are frequently nothing more than armed robbery writ large. That's what the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is: Vladimir Putin's Russia seized a vital port at Sevastopol, and then moved to take the mineral-rich eastern provinces of Ukraine. And any major war, a third - or fourth, if you prefer - world war, would likely be a contest between the United States, Japan, Australia, and what there is left of NATO against Russia, China, and very probably Iran and North Korea. That would appear, at the moment, to be where the battle lines are drawn. And here's the thing: None of these nations has an economic model that can survive a demographic collapse. Every modern economic system is based on the assumption that the population will increase, not decrease, and this is a recipe for conflict, when the effects of that demographic crash begin to be felt.
Such a war would be global in scope. Such a war would not differentiate between military and civil targets. Industrial sites will be hit. Cities will be incinerated. A war like this may well involve nuclear exchanges, maybe limited, maybe not; consider what extremes desperate men with nuclear weapons may be driven to. Worse, a war like this can and likely would involve biological agents, perhaps smuggled into one or more of the aggressor nations, or maybe just delivered by drone swarms.
We can hope to avoid any such major conflict. The scenario described here would be civilization-ending, not merely for the losers, but for humanity. There will be no winners. There will be no victory parades. There will be no post-war economic boom. There will be a few survivors, trying to pick a brutal living out of the harsh and unforgiving post-war world - if humankind is very, very lucky.
It's an awful thing to contemplate. But I am forced to once more repeat George Santayana's caution: Only the dead have seen the end of war.
