 "THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War & UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats")
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War
Author: Jim Sciutto
Publisher: Dutton
Pages: 353
Price: $30
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UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats
Author: Adam E Casey
Publisher: Basic Books
Pages: 323
Price: $32
Every few months when Donald J Trump was president, Iran made a show of its ballistic missiles and set off a small panic in Washington. The tests went like this: A missile flew up from one part of Iran, travelled through the country’s airspace and, ideally, blew up harmlessly in another part of Iran, hundreds of miles away.
The former White House political adviser John Kelly remembers that, on one such occasion, Trump said he wanted to shoot the weapon down. “Well, sir, that’s an act of war,” Kelly recalls telling him. “You really need to go over to Congress and get at least an authorization.”
“They’ll never go along with it,” Trump apparently replied.
“Well, I know,” Kelly said. “But that’s our system.”
This anecdote and many other alarming scenes appear in Jim Sciutto’s The Return of Great Powers, an absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship. Sciutto has interviewed several of Trump’s former advisers, including Kelly, who explains that he managed to talk his old boss out of some of his worst ideas only by suggesting they would hurt his standing in public opinion.
That such political figures would speak so candidly can be partly credited to Sciutto’s standing as CNN’s chief national security analyst and his earlier stint with the State Department under Barack Obama. He’s the kind of well-connected reporter who, as we learn in this book, gets a call at 3 am, in February 2022, from an unnamed Congress member to warn him that a war in Ukraine is imminent.
The Return of Great Powers argues that we are living through a Cold War redux. The battle is being waged on every imaginable front, from undersea communication cables to satellites in outer space and the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.
One great difference between this cold war and the last, Sciutto contends, is that the guardrails erected to prevent superpower rivalries from sliding into catastrophe have been steadily dismantled. Over the past quarter-century, both the United States and Russia have abandoned one arms control treaty after another and lines of communication between all three powers have been purposely reduced. As one unnamed State Department official tells Sciutto, when a mysterious Chinese balloon drifted across North America last fall, the Chinese military “refused to pick up the phone.”
Add to this precarity those proxy mischief-makers — North Korea, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to name a few — that might see advantage in provoking a superpower showdown. It’s enough to send those with a front-row view into the old basement bomb shelter.
Having identified the peril, Sciutto’s panelists also agree on the solutions: Unwavering commitment to the defence of Ukraine; greater integration of NATO forces; much closer cooperation between the European and Asian blocs of democratic nations. Ironically, many of these recommendations are now being enacted thanks to the Russian invasion and Chinese encroachments — long-neutral Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and East Asian nations have strengthened their mutual defence pacts.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for concern. Trump, once again his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has fought against US military aid to Ukraine and urged Russia “to do whatever the hell” it wants to NATO members who fail to meet their financial obligations.
The ideal way forward for a great power like the United States has always been fraught, and looking back at the mistakes and successes of the Cold War is often instructive, but not always. Adam E Casey’s Up in Arms is well written and clearly the product of prodigious research; it also shows how Cold War comparisons can sometimes go too far.
Casey, a former academic who is now a national security analyst for a curiously unspecified branch of the US government, sets out to re-examine the accepted wisdom that US aid to totalitarian regimes served to maintain and prolong those dictatorships during the latter half of the 20th century. In rebutting this thesis, he sets out some statistics that are initially eye-catching. According to his examination of hundreds of Cold War authoritarian regimes, Soviet-supported rulers survived, on average, twice as long as American-supported ones. Most startling, in any given year, US-backed dictators were about seven times more likely to fall than their Soviet counterparts.
Casey gamely suggests his findings might have currency as the planet enters another period of superpower jockeying, but it is hard to see precisely how this military-proxy dynamic of yore replicates itself. China has never shown much interest in extending its martial reach to countries beyond Asia, and Russian military tutelage is surely trading at a deep discount after its dismal Ukrainian outing.
As for the United States, while displaying little reservation about cosying up to despots when convenient — witness some of the grotesqueries it has climbed into bed with for the so-called “war on terror” — it’s hard to imagine any eagerness to go back to the days of army-building in the wake of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan war hangovers.
That being said, in 10 or 20 years, the hangovers could fade.
Giving up on democracy is all the rage these days. The leaders of the great powers could start eyeing Cold War-inspired playbooks like Casey’s, with dire results for everyone caught in between.
The reviewer’s most recent book is The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — A Tragedy in Three Acts
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