https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/10/the-coming-world-crisis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
The U.S. faces a choice between courage and cowardice
The 31-year-long apparent peace that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial conquest once again became an instrument of the revisionist powers. Yet history, particularly that of the globe-spanning violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that once crises begin to cluster, they tend to worsen and become a worldwide eruption of violence.
In this respect, democracies today are in a situation similar to that of the 1930s. The folly of the century preceding the ’30s was not precisely appeasement — the strategy that grants an aggressive adversary limited, albeit significant, gains to satiate its appetite for expansion — but rather a lack of recognition of the systemic inevitability of contestation and conflict. The threat today, similarly, is not appeasement but the avoidance by democratic political leaders of strategic reality. War is coming, sooner or later. Democracies must prepare for a long-term struggle. And much as in the 1930s, we do not have the luxury of time or a head start.
It is more helpful to speak of a world crisis than of a world war, given the linguistic vagaries of “warfare,” a word that has a legal as well as a moral-political definition. The idea of world war is restrictive. What we term the First World War saw combat in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. But the conflict’s focal point was Europe, with relevant but limited skirmishing in the Middle East and Africa and almost no military activity in Asia after early 1915 because of the limited resources Germany could deploy beyond Europe. Was the First World War, then, not properly a world war? It involved every major power at the time. It was, moreover, the first modern conflict in which two major-power participants — the U.S. and Japan — were not European. Thus we might term the conflict a world war despite its focus in Europe.
This, however, raises a more important question of definition — that of time. The First World War stemmed from what may be termed the First World Crisis. Prior to the mid 19th century, international politics was nearly synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that technological, political, and military advances in Europe made the European powers incontestably dominant over any major actor elsewhere. The European wars that occurred between the 15th and 19th centuries, culminating in Napoleon’s bid for continental dominance, had global implications. The grand strategy of Napoleonic France included, at minimum, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia: France’s objective was to stress Britain’s link with its invaluable imperial possession, India, an end that it never achieved. Yet the central issue of the Napoleonic Wars — the structure of European and, by implication at the time, world order — was settled on European battlefields, in the European littoral, and at negotiating tables with dozens of European diplomats hashing out the details after the fighting was done. By the early 20th century, changes in the international power distribution could transform a European crisis into a world crisis.
