https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/the-world-needs-the-west/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
Reestablishing deterrence in a dangerous world
The world keeps getting more dangerous. It is now grappling with war in Ukraine; China’s increasingly bellicose actions in the South China Sea and its little-talked-about nuclear proliferation; and Iranian aggression that threatens the existence of Israel, the lives of U.S. forces and their allies in the Middle East, and the security of global shipping lanes. All of this is happening against the background of a project long held by authoritarian regimes, including Russia and China, to undermine the liberal order that has guaranteed peace in most of the West since World War II. The West needs to take seriously the threat. In response, it should double down on its investments in alliances, national-defense bases, and military institutions. Otherwise, it will learn the hard way how a steady erosion of military funding can break down deterrence and cause problems that ramify throughout the world, undermining security.
The liberal peace project was conceived after the horrors of the First World War but didn’t reach maturity until a quarter of a century later, in post–World War II Europe and North America. This resulting geopolitical order has largely held intact for the last 80 years, but now these revisionist powers are attempting to supplant it and develop an international regime more beneficial to their own interests. As they attempt to navigate these challenges, liberal democracies are struggling to reinforce military deterrence where prudent.
One large reason for that struggle is the prolonged “peace dividend” after the Cold War, which led many European nations to reduce national-defense spending by inordinate amounts. No longer did the specter of the Soviet Union threaten transatlantic security, and welfare states were established almost overnight, their budgets outstripping defense spending many times over. This led over the last 20 to 30 years to a military-capability erosion among many Western democracies, and thereby to the lack of a credible deterrent. Authoritarian states have sensed this decline and adjusted their force postures to exploit it. Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022 are examples, as is China’s increasingly aggressive behavior throughout the Indo-Pacific and its illegitimate territorial expansionism in the South China Sea.
There are strong historical parallels in the last century to modern-day Ukraine and the South China Sea. A rejuvenated and expansionist Germany sought to sweep across much of central and western Europe in the 1930s. It was allowed to do so in part because leaders in London and Washington were at first naïve about its intentions. Today’s authoritarian dictatorships are similarly taking advantage of what is at best a perceived Western indifference to global affairs and turn toward isolationist foreign policy, and at worst a perceived Western military and diplomatic weakness. Whatever their exact assessment of the West at present, Moscow and Beijing are trying to rewrite historical borders much as last century’s fascist dictators did.
