Glyn Ford on the Volatility of Global Politics
The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and the Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad published by Allen Lane
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobson published by Penguin
We live in interesting times. The Coming Storm argues that where we are now is not the beginning of a Second Cold War, as many claim, but rather a tear in history where the challengers to American hegemony play out who is to replace Washington as the globe’s Great Successor. For Westad, this is absolutely not 1945, where two ideologically sorted blocks competed globally for hearts and minds, but rather the reprise of the opening act of that long half-century play from the late Victorian era until the end of the Second World War, when it had become self-evident to all but London that the sun was going down on the British Empire. The twin principal players in this turn-of-the-century melodrama were Germany and the United States, but after World War I, they were joined on the global stage by Japan and Russia; the first an Asian arriviste and the second substituting sedition for raw power. The finale saw tens of millions die for the result.
Now that the American century draws to an early close. Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? claimed that during the last 500 years, three-quarters of such rising power transitions were resolved in war. Washington’s China paranoia and its current trajectory make such an outcome inevitable. The last transition was familial; between kissing cousins – Britain and the United States – where the ‘good and gallant loser’ was made a joint enterprise trusty for America’s imperial ambitions. Few, if any, of the new contestants share that Anglo-Saxon relationship. Yesterday’s incest is trumped by tomorrow’s miscegenation.
While the front runner ultimately to humble the US is China, as it was a century ago, there are other challengers. India is in the mix, and so too, but running a pitiful race, is the European Union; alongside are a series of spoilers who will affect the competition’s outcome as they jockey for position and influence. These include Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria.
Compared to the last transition, there is the ugly spectre of racism, oft disguised and dressed in the language of values, compounded by the grim reality of nuclear proliferation. Thus, this time in a flash, it’s existential. It is all too easy to imagine the majority of today’s nuclear powers resorting to the first use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki when backed in a corner and on the verge of defeat: Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea. They are likely to be joined by Seoul and Tokyo in short order. With nuclear weapons in play, the threat is final.
The end’s trigger is more likely to be cock-up than a conspiracy, not that that will be much consolation. The logic of Mutually Assured Destruction requires little thought, but misjudgements, misunderstandings and simple mistakes threaten to counter its self-evident intellectual power. Back in 2017, during the US – North Korea stand-off, Pyongyang was determined not to gift Washington the opportunity for a devastating preventive strike. The North would pre-empt when they saw signals coming out of Washington that, for them, meant the inevitability of war. The key for Pyongyang was a US order to evacuate non-combatants from South Korea. Trump was on the verge of ordering such an evacuation before the White House got the message. More good luck than good judgment.
The sheer horror facing the world by accident or design in this era of hair-trigger tensions is laid out in Nuclear War: A Scenario. This reels out the pattern of events consequent on any perceived nuclear attack on one of the principal nuclear powers, especially Washington, as it threatens to continue to up the military ante in the face of its increasing economic subordination. The scenario is a simple one; a rogue missile from North Korea triggers a devastating US counter, where most of the spray of missiles is on a trajectory over Russia. Moscow, believing itself under attack, empties its silos in retaliation aimed at the US and allies, whose dying blast is a second counterstrike against Russia.
There is no possibility for thought, no time for diplomacy. This all takes barely more than an hour from start to finish. By then, lucky billions – no longer millions – are dead, and the same number quickly dying. While the Northern hemisphere is uninhabitable, survivors in the South face a nuclear winter that will see starvation kill most of those spared by radioactive fallout. Trump threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age; that will only be a start if the US doesn’t apply the lessons of history to an era that is orders of magnitude more dangerous and deadly than 1917-18 and 1941-45.