Despite the Ukraine war having reached its first anniversary, the relevance of the conflict is still not recognized. Russia’s assault inaugurated a formal competition for dominion over the Eurasian landmass. Its goal was to create a strategic position from which it could crack NATO. As it stands, it has failed to conquer Ukraine, but now seeks to break NATO regardless.
The fundamental issue in this strategic competition is the incongruity between the Eurasian reality and American strategic balkanization and resource insufficiency.
The US Navy is unlikely to win a major war with China absent extensive support from the US Air Force and Marine Corps and a major allied commitment. Yet even with total “concentration” in the Indo-Pacific region, even if the United States were to subordinate every other strategic question to that of deterring and defeating China, the People’s Liberation Army would have a multi-year window of opportunity.
The PLA outclasses the US Navy by tonnage. It has greater repair and production capacity than the US Navy for both warships and aircraft. This disparity holds even if US capabilities are taken alongside those of America’s allies.
Even if the US wins the first battle of the next war and, alongside Japan and Australia, and likely the Philippines, South Korea, and possibly Vietnam, repulses a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan, the damage will be immense. Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity will be damaged.
Global shipping costs will skyrocket, and all Asian trade will be disrupted. Moreover, tens of thousands of Americans could perish in the first weeks of a war even if the US is victorious.
US Pacific Fleet Admiral Samuel Paparo told the CBS show 60 Minutes on March 19 that Chinese missiles could hit US carriers. The PLA is also likely to damage dozens of other warships, and hit American bases at least up to Guam.
This is not to mention the knock-on economic and financial costs of the conflict. China’s role in the critical minerals supply chain is lethal.
The People’s Republic extracts relatively few critical minerals and materials but controls an 80%-plus stake in the refinement and processing of these minerals. Hence the PRC has both the stockpiles of various elements to sustain domestic industry and a deep-seated structural advantage in their production given its de facto monopoly on their processing.
This reality, again even in the event of victory, will intensify the economic crisis until the West and its allies can respond. Financially speaking, a conflict would send the price of oil skyrocketing, even more so if a concurrent Middle Eastern contingency developed, and destroy the global financial system as it has existed for the past 40 years.
All the above will occur even if, once again, the US wins the first battle of the next war. There will be subsequent battles. China may expand the war elsewhere, triggering a contingency on the Korean Peninsula or against Vietnam.
China will also seek to blockade Taiwan, forcing the US to sustain it through a massive sealift, and thereby shattering American and allied sealift and merchant marine capacity. Most critically, unless the US can destroy the bulk of Chinese ports and airfields, the PLA will be able to rebuild its combat power in just a few years, if not a few months, depending on the actual damage to its ships.
This balance of forces may shift over the next 15 years.
The cost of catching up
Proper capabilities investments from the US – investments in artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data fusion, secure communications, munitions production, and unmanned systems, along with shipyard capacity for overhaul and repair – would, if large enough, create a Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps capable of deterring Chinese action against Taiwan by credibly denying China a short- or long-term military victory.
This would require a major increase in defense spending, a boost to around $1.6 trillion over the next five years and that same level of spending sustained well into the 2030s.
Spending that sum of money on the US military demands a stable US economy. The US economy at this point is structurally unstable. Two decades of low interest rates, including a decade of no interest rates, has finally created an inflationary spiral alongside setting the conditions for a banking crisis.
A recession is likely in the next 12 months. The US Federal Reserve is disincentivized to a rate increase that would be needed, a full 50 basis points, and continue this discipline for at least two more Federal Open Market Committee meetings before tapering off at the end of 2023.
Rather, it is now incentivized to restrain any anti-inflationary behavior, or risk the complete destabilization of American and global financial markets, a string of bank failures, and a financial crisis far more structurally worrying than the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent recession.
This is no environment in which to be raising military spending – either these spending increases will be unpopular as a recession sinks in or they will be eaten away by inflation. A combination of entitlement reform, social-spending cuts, and sustained high interest rates is crucial if the US is to right its fiscal ship. But these again create conditions non-conducive for defense spending.
Eurasia strategy
We have established three points. First, even a complete rebalance to the Indo-Pacific region in pure military terms would not deter China from assaulting Taiwan.
It may create a more favorable balance of forces to the United States for a short window of two to five years – although this is assuming a complete Indo-Pacific reorientation, intense engagement with potential allies and partners including Vietnam, and most critically, a major American force presence on Taiwan.
This in turn may require recognition of Taiwanese independence, a politically impossible measure given the perception that such an action crosses a fundamental Chinese “red line.”
Second, even this complete reorientation to Taiwan will not prepare the US for a long war. Only a massive defense-spending injection that prioritizes key technological and productive areas will provide the US for this war. Hence the reorientation, while solidifying the balance of forces briefly, will guarantee a confrontation within the decade.
Third, and most critical, the United States’ economic and domestic political environment speaks very strongly against a defense spending increase. It will be unpopular and eaten away by aggressive inflation.
What does this mean for American strategy in Eurasia?
China-led coalition
America’s vital interest in geopolitical terms remains the denial of hegemony to a power or coalition on the Eurasian landmass.
The coalition that aspires hegemony is unmistakable today. Foremost within it is China, which seeks to take Taiwan, thereby break the First Island Chain, and leave Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Australia vulnerable to long-term economic and strategic pressure, hence forcing each state to choose between isolation and capitulation to Chinese power.
Iran is an exceptionally aggressive and calculating member of this coalition. It seeks to become a bona fide great power through the acquisition of nuclear weapons and, after subsequent conquest and gray-zone expansion, ultimately gaining political control of the Middle East’s oil reserves and major maritime chokepoints.
Russia, finally, seeks to resurrect its core European imperial territories of Ukraine and Belarus, and ultimately add the Baltics, Moldova, and parts of the Caucasus. With these in hand, Russia once again becomes a great power capable of confronting Western Europe economically and politically, and one that can deal with China as a somewhat equal.
To emerge victorious in this struggle for Eurasian mastery, the US must deny all of these powers their objectives. Herein lies the difficulty.
It seems near-impossible for the US to deny the PRC its objective – to take Taiwan – if China is willing to accept severe economic pain and loss of life to take the island. No immediate-term pivot will shift the balance of forces very much, even if the US redeploys its entire military to Asia.
Three problems
Fundamentally, the US needs time. During the First Cold War, the US benefited from a prior major-power Eurasian conflict.
Indeed, the greatest windfall from the early 20th century’s struggle for Eurasian mastery was the materiel capacity it necessitated in the United States. America could prosecute a war on the Eurasian rimland and employ both legacy stockpiles of materiel and the same productive processes to create new weapons of war.
In this Second Cold War, the US emerges from an unprecedented period of peace, during which it had neither the need nor the will to maintain even a modicum of military-industrial capacity.
The US needs time to rebuild its arsenal and ensure at thits military-industrial capacity is fit to deploy a force that can win a major-power war with primarily conventional means.
The Eurasian sub-region in which a direct US contribution can be expected in the next five years is Asia. This is what must be deterred. But the Asian problem sits alongside the European and Middle Eastern problems.
A defeat in Ukraine would allow Russia to rebuild its military power within the next five years, thereby threatening Europe. The US would be faced with a choice between a major ground-force commitment to Europe or its extrication from Europe. This would result in not European strategic autonomy, but European subordination to Russian objectives alongside Europe’s balancing with China.
The European littorals remain crucial for food and energy exports, while Europe itself remains a relevant high-technology space. Hence the US has a major interest in ensuring that the European security system remains American-backed without forcing the US to choose between intervention or capitulation.
Western defeat in Ukraine means nothing less than the recapture of Crimea and Ukraine’s southern oblasts. The Donbas is a slightly different question – it provides valuable strategic depth, but a Ukrainian military with better maneuver elements could more effectively sustain a defense in the east without the Donbas. But absent the recapture of Crimea and the south, Ukraine will remain at Russia’s mercy. This guarantees another war.
Meanwhile, Ukraine will not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization immediately upon the cessation of hostilities, nor will it join the European Union. Russia will use the interim period between a ceasefire and a notional accession date to disrupt the Atlantic alliance, stall the accession process, and ensure another hybrid crisis against NATO, again attacking NATO through Ukraine.
If it succeeds fully, NATO will splinter, and Russia will dominate Eastern and Central Europe, concluding a pact with France and Germany that succors China.
Even if it succeeds only partly, it will still conquer Ukraine, absorb Belarus, and also subsequently encounter a number of far-right Euroskeptic and Atlantic-skeptic partners in Eastern Europe that understandably feel betrayed by Washington, Brussels, Paris and Berlin having agreed to a separate peace.
Europe is paradoxically the area in which the US must expand its materiel commitment. The US is winning in Europe. Russia can be militarily defeated with only a remote risk of non-strategic nuclear use, let alone a strategic nuclear exchange. This situation is so bizarrely lucky that it was never even considered historically in American strategy.
Germany and France are finally under American strategic control once again. The Turkey question has receded in Paris, and the Moscow question in Berlin. Meanwhile, Poland has emerged as an EU counterbalance to Germany and France.
If the Eastern European EU states, including Finland and Sweden, can be brought into a political coalition that also includes the Baltics and Black Sea states, this will create a moderately robust Atlanticist bloc that mitigates, or even solves, the United States’ European problem.
Hence the US must expand support for Ukraine, accept risk to its ground-warfare stockpiles, and transfer to Ukraine the means to achieve a durable peace settlement – that is, a peace settlement with defensible borders first and foremost, and subsequently a political arrangement that ensures Ukraine’s long-term sovereignty, territorial integrity, and Western orientation.
In the Middle East, American strategy should achieve two long-term objectives. First, to deny Iran its hegemonic regional objectives. Second, the US should seek to prevent the emergence of Saudi Arabia as another Middle Eastern and Arab hegemonic aspirant.
Saudi Arabia is positioning itself to become a regionally revisionist power, through its rivalry with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, its dealings with China and Russia, and its increasingly open desire for a nuclear weapon.
Solving the Iran question, or at least postponing it through a military strike, would have been immensely prudent in the mid- to late 2010s. However, it is too late to set back the Iranian program by more than a handful of years, and the regime itself is likely too stable to topple through anything but a major ground war.
Hence the US should instead target the implements of Iranian power, supporting Israel in its campaign against Hezbollah, giving Israel a complete free hand in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and ideally persuading Saudi Arabia to reverse course and resume its effort in Yemen to defeat the Iranian-backed Houthis with explicit American support.
Meanwhile, the US should prioritize Israeli-Turkish relations, attempting to create another leg for Jerusalem’s diplomacy to the north, and leveraging Israel’s hybrid European-Middle Eastern political and strategic status. This will de-emphasize Saudi Arabia in the long term and reduce the leverage Riyadh has operationalized through its reticence to join the Abraham Accords.
The goal in the Middle East is not deterrence, but a rollback of Iranian influence wherever possible, including in contexts that prompt regional conflict.
The problem of Asia again rears its toothy head. The US is unlikely to win an Asian war within this decade. Put more precisely, the only way the US could win an Asian non-strategic nuclear war with China is through luck – China would need to experience an economic shock so great that it fractures politically, a remote proposition considering the frailty of the American economy.
The United States’ goal in this decade must be therefore the deferral of confrontation absent an erosion of the United States’ physical position.
Diplomatically, this requires creating a coalition fleet that combines American, Japanese, Philippine, and ideally Taiwanese and South Korean combat power in a fully integrated manner. This combination of forces does create a naval force that can counter China if properly deployed. It cannot win in the long haul, but by jeopardizing the first part of the invasion, this fleet can deter China for another half-decade.
The US should also vigorously explore a diplomatic settlement with Vietnam and India. Both powers would be crucial in an Indo-Pacific contingency. The US should identify an alternative source of petrochemicals for Indian purposes, thereby reducing the relationship India has with Russia. It should also overlook any misguided human-rights concerns about India’s domestic policy and aggressively pursue a partnership with it against China.
Going nuclear
Finally, the US should, within the next five years, invest heavily in the deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons in the Indo-Pacific region. The objective of such an action is to ensure that, during a major Indo-Pacific war, the US is capable of destroying Chinese port capacity.
The US should completely revamp its doctrine to do this, but by holding Chinese repair facilities at genuine risk, the US can – at this point – credibly threaten to tip the balance against China in a longer war. This is not an indefinite solution to the China problem. But it does buy the US time, likely another two to five years on top of various redeployments and allied relationships, to put its strategic house in order.
The United States’ centuries-old interest in assuring its economic and military security by preventing the rise of a hegemonic power in Europe applies no less to Eurasia, the landmass that stretches from the English Channel to the Taiwan Strait.
The Russia-Iran-North Korea-China axis demonstrates the potential of a large and hostile ascendant challenge. So does the current European war in which the US and China face each other through the proxies of Ukraine and Russia.
The Second Cold War threatens to be hotter than its predecessor. US geo-strategy requires a far more comprehensive scope now and in the future if it is to protect Americans’ security.