Why I’m Still Not Worried About World War III
A lot of things have changed since 1914 and 1939.
The events of last Sunday – in which Iran retaliated against the bombing of its embassy in Damascus by launching about 300 drones and missiles at Israel, nearly all of which were intercepted – has made a lot of people start wondering if we’re seeing the foreshocks of World War III.
Their idea is that the Israel-Hamas-Iran war has the potential to be one front of a global conflict, with the Russia-Ukraine war becoming another front, and a potential war between China and the Asian maritime powers (Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and perhaps Vietnam) becoming a third.
This argument is worth paying attention to. After all, the two World Wars of the Twentieth Century didn’t erupt from a single cause, either – both involved numerous countries battling out longstanding rivalries that did not, at first, have much to do with each other. But eventually, the benefits of working together against a common foe led the belligerents to sort themselves into two rival coalitions, which then fought brutally until one side had thoroughly beaten the other.
The roots of World War I ran very deep. The Ottoman Empire had been declining for well over two centuries, and had recently lost a great deal of territory due to rebellions in the Balkans. Meanwhile the Austrians were competing with the Russians for influence in the formerly-Ottoman territories, often arousing deep hatred among people like Gavrilo Princip, who thought that after all this fighting, the Slavic nations ought to be their own masters. France still held a deep grudge against Germany over the events of 1870, and many Frenchman were hoping that a new war would break out so that their country had a chance of regaining Alsace and Loraine. Meanwhile the British had been eying Germany anxiously since Bismarck’s days, afraid of losing their own hegemony if they let a single Continental power lord it over the others the way that Napoleon’s empire had tried to do.
Then, in June of 1914, the Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne. Austria made preparations to invade Serbia, Tsar Nicholas said he supported the Serbs, Kaiser Wilhelm said he supported Austria, the French said they would join the war against Germany if Russia were attacked, the Germans demanded that Belgium allow their army to march through on its way to France, the British said the Germans had no right to make such a demand… and within five weeks of the assassination, all of these countries were at war.
World War II took a lot longer to get started. The first of its foreshocks was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, followed by the invasion of China proper in 1937, launching the Second Sino-Japanese War, which would continue clear up to August of 1945, and kill more people than any other theatre of World War II except Germany vs. Russia.
In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and between 1936 and 1939 the Fascist powers (Italy plus Germany) and the Soviet Union fought a proxy war in Spain; the Fascists won, which is why Spain spent the next few decades as a Catholic dictatorship rather than a Communist one, though Francisco Franco had the good sense to not join Hitler’s other wars later on. Then in 1938 and 1939, the Germans reinvaded several territories that they still felt sore about losing in World War I; the allied powers tolerated the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland, but not of Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany in September of 1939. (But not on the Soviet Union, which at that time was friendly with Germany, and which had invaded the other half of Poland).
Despite the declaration of war, there wasn’t much fighting for the next seven months (except in Finland, which Stalin also invaded) and it wasn’t until Spring of 1940, when Germany invaded France and started bombing England, that the Western Allies really understood how serious the matter was.
And it wasn’t until 1941 – when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Japanese attacked British and American possessions in the Pacific in a bid to get oil and other resources to fuel their war in China – that all of the great powers were involved in the war, with the final alliance system in place.
What does this have to do with the present day? Well, a lot of people see an analogy between what happened then and what’s happening now.
Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are loosely allied with each other as each of these countries is trying, in different ways, to upend a balance of power in which they feel dishonored. The United States, the other NATO countries, Japan, and South Korea are in a somewhat tighter alliance as they try to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, countries like Ukraine, Israel, Vietnam, and Taiwan are in a perilous situation; they all rely on the American-led coalition for support, but the United States has no formal treaty obligations toward them, which makes them more appealing targets for the Russia-China-Iran bloc. India, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia are wildcards who don’t reliably line up on either side.
The Russia-Ukraine war could expand at any moment; some pundits are saying that it’s reckless for NATO to give material support to Ukraine since this could incites Russia into war with other NATO countries, while others are saying that it’s reckless not to, since if Russia defeats Ukraine it will be in a strong position to invade the rest of Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile the Israel-Hamas-Iran war might also expand into a regional war that drags in the United States. This (so goes the argument) got a lot closer to happening with the missile exchange on Sunday. And finally there is the possibility of war between China and the other countries whose territory it claims, either in whole (Taiwan) or in part (Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Japan).
This is the thesis that the Substack economist Noah Smith made in his recent essay, “Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war.” Basically, Smith is looking at the historical analogies between the present situation and the previous World Wars, and he sees a serious risk of the same thing happening again: various small conflicts getting bigger and joining into one global conflagration, as nation after nation comes to believe – rightly or wrongly – that its own national survival is tied up with the fate of its larger bloc.
Noah Smith’s analysis is worth your attention. Smith identifies himself as a liberal, but he’s the kind of liberal who’s worth reading from time to time, since he believes that crime is bad, that young Americans who wave Palestinian flags or demand that we ‘defund the police’ are making fools of themselves, that free markets are necessary for prosperity, and that when poor Americans have trouble finding housing and jobs, it’s as often as not a result of overregulation making it hard for entrepreneurs to build useful things. Basically, he defends the kinds of ideas that were mainstream in the Democratic party in the 1990s.
And yet, at the end of the day, I don’t agree with Smith’s ideas about World War III. It’s not just that the threat of nuclear war makes the great powers much more cautious about direct conflict than they used to be. (Great power competition switched from direct war to proxy war after 1945 for a reason). But there have also been serious changes in geography, weapons systems, and demographics that make large scale war much harder now than it was in the early twentieth century. Hence my having three big reasons (besides nuclear deterrence) for not worrying about World War III.
1. Great Powers Are Too Far Apart
If you look at a map of Europe in 1914, you won’t just see different borders from today’s map – you’ll also notice that, back then, there were a lot fewer small countries. Most of Europe was divided between Germany, France, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Turkey, Italy, and Russia. Switzerland and Portugal existed, along with the Low Countries, the Nordic kingdoms, and a half-dozen Balkan states. But for the most part the post-1815 arrangements – meant to satiate the victors of the Napoleonic Wars by letting each of the great powers swallow up a bunch of its smaller neighbors – still held.
As a result of this, there were no buffer zones. Germany had long borders with both of its main rivals, France and Russia. Russia bordered both Germany and Austria. When tensions were high, troops would be massed along these borders. And at a time when rapid mobilization could be the key to winning a war, a lot of strategists considered it foolhardy to not strike first.
In the runup to World War II, the situation was less extreme – Japan was separated from China and its other enemies by water (though the Japanese had a foothold on the Asian continent in the form of Korea). Germany and Russia had Poland as a buffer zone. Yet there were still a lot fewer countries than today, and the distances between great powers were not as great as they would later become. While the second World War started in a slower and more piecemeal fashion than the first, it still managed to go global in the end.
Today, the distances between great powers are huge. Nowhere are they packed cheek-by-jowl like they were in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For instance, if you walk west from Moscow, you have to go about 1500 miles, through four different countries, before you get to France, the only other country in continental Europe that’s even halfway to great power status.
If post-communist Poland had recovered the great power status that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had had in the 17th century, then the Poles would almost certainly have joined the Russia-Ukraine war a long time ago, since great powers have always had a strong interest in not letting their neighbors get annexed by rival great powers. (Or more likely, Russia would have anticipated this and not invaded Ukraine at all).
But as it is, Poland – along with Germany, the Baltic States, and every other nearby country – is dependent on NATO for its security, and none of them are going to jeopardize that arrangement by entering a war that is of only marginal interest to the United States.
The situation isn’t much different in the Middle East. While there are plenty of Middle Eastern countries that hate Israel, only one of them, Iran, is a peer competitor. And as we saw on Sunday morning, the thousand-kilometer gap between Iran and Israel is too much for Iran’s missiles to cross – especially when several other Middle Eastern countries, such as Jordan, are afraid enough of Iranian hegemony that they’re willing to lay aside their hard feelings toward Zionism to shoot down the missiles that violate their airspace.
China, meanwhile, is separated from India by the Himalayas. Hence the fact that the occasional skirmishes between these countries, despite sometimes leaving more than a dozen men dead, have never erupted into a large war – it just isn’t possible to project power across a natural obstacle of that sort. And the country that China wants to invade most, Taiwan, is surrounded by water, and an amphibious assault on the scale required to take it has never been attempted before.
I have already argued that Taiwan is at risk of squandering its natural advantages by not devoting enough resources to defense. But in the event that China manages to fight through Taiwan’s missiles, aircraft, and artillery, and set up a beachhead, a successful American counterattack is even less likely, since North America is about 6000 miles away, and the United States has no realistic chance of depriving the Chinese of naval superiority within 200 miles of their own coast.
There is certainly a risk of a regional war in East Asia – not least because countries like Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines all have a strong interest in stopping Chinese expansionism early on – but the United States is poorly positioned to play the deciding role there.
2. There Are Too Few Young People
Right now, Russia’s fertility rate is about 1.49 births per woman. China’s is an even worse 1.16. Iran, despite being a theocracy, seems to care more about whether women cover their hair than whether they produce the next generation, and its fertility rate has slid to 1.69 – remarkably low for a Muslim country.
None of these countries have the sort of young, vigorous, patriotic population which can be enthusiastically marched off to war the way that so many bright-eyed European youths were between 1914 and 1918. Instead, the populations of both the “New Axis” and the “New Allies” are old, with fewer and fewer boys reaching manhood each year, and their militaries struggle to meet their recruiting goals. These are not the circumstances in which a national leader is likely to enter a large war.
Just consider the fact that, by the end of last year, Russia has suffered about 315,000 casualties in Ukraine (according to American intelligence), which is about 35 percent of the number of baby boys born in Russia each year. This is, speaking proportionately, about twice the human cost that the United States paid in the entire Pacific Theatre of World War II. And Russia has spent all this blood on capturing about 10 percent of the territory of just one of the many former Soviet possessions in Eastern Europe.
The fantasies of Russia reassembling its old empire are not going to come true, no matter how much some American commentators may fear (or hope?) otherwise. The demographic realities are against it. Far from being the vigorous wellspring of counter-leftism that a lot of pundits have projected onto it, Russia is just one more declining European nation, with typical European problems. Its native population is demoralized (look at how many young Russians fled to Kazakhstan, Finland, and other neighboring countries to avoid this war) and struggles to produce offspring; meanwhile the country has tried to ‘solve’ the resulting problems by importing scads of Muslims immigrants who govern their ethnic enclaves by Sharia law and occasionally wage jihad against the nearest infidels.
And in China the situation is even worse. Granted, there are so many Chinese to begin with that it wouldn’t surprise me if Comrade Xi decided to sacrifice a few million of them in an attempt to expand his rule into Taiwan. But if his country doesn’t even have enough young people to resume the economic growth that it was experiencing before the fiasco with the bat virus, then I doubt that it’s up to the challenge of displacing the United States as the global hegemon.
3. Weapons Technology Favors the Defender
The balance of power between offense and defense has swung back and forth many times throughout history. In the Middle Ages stone castles often decided the fates of nations, since it was usually impossible to take them without a long siege. Then the Gunpower Age loosened things up, and by Napoleon’s time a battlefront could surge across Europe in a year or two.
The swing toward offense peaked in 1870, when Bismarck’s Prussian army overran France and took the last Emperor captive with his whole army in scarcely more than a month. But by 1914, new technologies like belt-fed weapons and much larger field guns had totally inverted the situation, and the trench warfare of World War I saw fronts that moved less in some years than Napoleon’s forces did on some days.
Over the next twenty years, engineers were hard at work finding new uses for small engines, and by the time World War II broke out, mobile armies were back in. Blitzkrieg – the new set of tactics that combined armor, air support, and truck-based logistics to punch through enemy lines, drive deep into hostile territory, and envelope stranded units – led to the German capture of Paris in 1940, as Hitler’s men achieved in six weeks what their fathers couldn’t do in four years.
Yet by 2022, the pendulum had swung the other way. The technologies of modern war favor the defender, as I explained in one of my previous posts:
The Russia-Ukraine war is the first time since World War II and its aftershocks that two upper-tier national governments have fought a lengthy land conflict. Prior to February of 2022, hardly anyone knew what modern war looked like; now, we have some ideas. To begin with, vast improvements in the accuracy of nearly all weapons have tilted the balance of war toward the defenders. Trench warfare a la World War I is back in; laser-guided artillery paired with quadcopter spotters, plus cheap suicide drones that can carry warheads straight to the most vulnerable parts of tanks, have made 1939-40 style Blitzkrieg unfeasible.
At first this was bad for Russia, since Russia’s original plan seemed to be to thunder over the border and occupy Ukraine’s capital, and perhaps most of its land, within a few weeks. When this failed, as much due to bad logistics on Russia’s part as to the unexpected bravery of the Ukrainians, the Russians retreated from their overextended position, after which soldiers on both sides dug in and the front stagnated.
Last weekend’s failed Iranian attack on Israel is another example of modern technology being heavily stacked against attackers. A few decades ago, most of Israel’s missile-defense technology didn’t exist, and while systems like Iron Dome and Arrow were on the drawing board, a lot of commentators dismissed them as fantastical. The conventional wisdom was that trying to shoot down high-speed missiles – especially ballistic missiles that fly above the atmosphere – was as hopeless as trying to hit a bullet with another bullet.
Yet now, Israel is capable (at least under optimal circumstances) of intercepting missiles nearly 99 percent of the time. And that’s as true for Iran’s missiles as it is for the typical Gazan rocket made from a dug-up irrigation pipe stuffed with home-made fuel and explosives.
And in a world where launching a large, expensive long-range missile often does nothing more than deprive your enemy of a small, cheap, short-range missile, a country’s ability to deal out damage to an enemy hundreds of miles away isn’t what it used to be.
Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that Iran expected the Israeli defenses to perform well, and that the attack’s main purpose was really to (1) maintain Iran’s national honor and convince the Iranian people that the bombing of the Damascus consulate had been adequately avenged, (2) eat up Israeli interceptor missiles, (3) gather intelligence about Israel’s missile defenses, and (4) frighten Israel’s allies, who are generally much less willing to confront Iran than Israel itself is.
Iran has actually been quite careful about giving Israel chances to deescalate – not only did Iran launch its slowest missiles first (the opposite of what one does when one wants to catch the enemy unprepared) but Iran’s UN office topped of this (predictable) tactical failure by announcing that it considers the matter “closed” and won’t strike again unless forced to.
As Peter Zeihan said: “I have never seen a military assault more telegraphed, choreographed, or bristling with advanced specific notice to ensure that the script does not result in escalation.”
Would a non-theatrical Iranian attack result in more damage? Probably. But next to the situation 25 years ago, when hardly any of its missile interceptors were in place, Israel is definitely at an advantage.
Finally, there is the situation in the Pacific, where a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the most talked-about (but far from the only) potential flash-point. Here again, changes in technology between World War II and today are critical. The Normandy landings of 1944 (which are still the largest amphibious assault in history) worked primarily because the vast majority of the munitions that the Germans fired didn’t hit their targets.
Nowadays, any force attacking a well-defended beach will have to deal with laser-guided artillery, heat-seeking missiles, quadcopters that can fly a small bomb straight to the most vulnerable parts of the landing craft, and so forth. Which is not to mention satellite intelligence that would give the defender several days or weeks warning before the attack.
Of course, it’s still possible that Taiwan could lose – Taiwanese army discipline is lax, and Taiwan is not devoting as much money or manpower to defence as it should be. And it’s also possible that China could try to blockade Taiwan and starve it into submission rather than invading outright. But the latter is something that China is only likely to try if it’s confident of its own naval superiority.
At present, the Chinese and American navies are about equal in tonnage (though the US still has the edge in quality). Yet China also has 232 times the annual shipbuilding capacity of the United States. While the reasons for this humiliating disparity are too long to get into here, it’s safe to say that, once the Americans lose naval dominance in the West Pacific, they’re not getting it back. Either China will dominate those waters, or the other countries that are actually in that part of the world – such as Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, and Taiwan itself – will pick up the burden of their own defence. In either case there is little risk of global war.
Conclusion
I believe that these three factors – the large distances between great powers, the poor demographics of the revanchist countries, and the strong advantages which modern weapons technologies give to the defender – will make a repeat of the processes that led to the First and Second World Wars very unlikely.
And then there are also nuclear weapons, which ever since 1945 have done an excellent job of preventing direct wars between great powers.
Will the Atomic Peace last another 78 years? It’s too early to say for certain.
For what it’s worth, I do carry iodine pills in case of a radiation emergency. But I’ve also said, on several occasions, that I’m more worried about diversity-based hiring at nearby nuclear power plants than I am about what’s going on in Asia and Europe.
The greatest empires are always destroyed from within.
It's becoming an increasingly crazy world. I'm trying to identify a country that is not in the competition to self-destruct first. I can't. That's dangerous because in descent to tyranny and poverty, leaders can do crazy things. Looking specifically at China, Xi's re-embrace of central planning, and the imbalance between adult men and women, will be a major source of weakening. That said, North Korea has shown that even the poorest countries can be very troublesome.
As usual, a well-written piece that makes a strong case for the author's thesis, which everyone, of any political persuasion, will fervently hope is true. (And the diligent reader will be rewarded by following the links in his article: at your next dinner party, you'll be the leading expert on missile defense, the F-35, and why the technical advances by the Military-Industrial Complex are always deprecated, at first, by most journalists. For further in-depth analysis of variant of the author's first point, see Tim Marshall's book, PRISONERS OF GEOGRAPHY. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Geography ])
However ... the unstated assumption here is that the men leading the potential belligerent powers will always act rationally and/or will assume that their opponents will act rationally. And even the word 'rational' can encompass disastrous decisions that seemed, at the time, to be rational.
Note that the two World Wars of the previous century did not occur because the German leader decided, "I know what! I'll start a huge world war and end up fighting Russia, Britain, France and the United States all at the same time! How hard can it be?"
It may not be entirely accurate to say, as one historian did, that we 'sleptwalked' into WWI
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleepwalkers:_How_Europe_Went_to_War_in_1914 ] but neither was what happened the sort of cold-blooded deliberate set of actions undertaken deliberately to provoke war undertaken by the German leader at the time which led to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
I suspect that if a big war comes, it will come as the result of a chain of actions/responses which escalate. So we have to hope that the leaders of all the potential-war-starting powers are rational. The Iranians, ironically, are leading by example here, although their deliberate attempt to avoid escalation during recent events is no doubt because they're waiting until their nuclear weapons program is complete. So our comfort must be tempered.
In any case, given the economic interdependence of nations, not to mention the extreme destruction that modern technology is able to inflict, it is clear that war between great powers is very unlikely. It wouldnt be rational. There is a famous book making the case for war's irrationality (and therefore its unlikelihood) in modern times, titled THE GREAT ILLUSION, written Norman Angel, which should provide us with some comfort. It may be difficult to find, however, being written in 1908.