PowerSwitch

It is surely a sign of deepening global political tensions that the Financial Times, one of the world’s leading newspapers, chose to start the New Year with an editorial entitled “Reflections on the Great War”, drawing parallels between the present situation and that which led to the catastrophe 100 years ago.

As the editorial noted, in January 1914, few Europeans could have imagined that just seven months later “their political and military leaders would plunge the world into a cataclysmic war”, resulting in tens of millions of deaths and casualties over the next four years.

While offering the reassurance that “there is no reason to fear that the world is on the edge of such an epochal disaster”—no doubt, something similar would have been said in January 1914 had the question been raised—the editorial nevertheless noted that “there are some disquieting similarities between then and now.”

The Financial Times was not the only newspaper to draw a parallel between the geo-political relations of 2014 and those of a century ago.

In a comment published on January 2, British Daily Telegraph economic columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard referred to the return of the “spectre of 1914.” He noted that New Year predictions, while never easy, were “nigh impossible in the midst of a global regime change with so many political bombs primed to go off at any moment.”

Likening China’s imposition of an Air Defence Identification Zone in attempt to challenge Japan’s claims to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea to the German Kaiser’s disputes with France “to test Britain's response before the First World War,” he continued: “Asia’s two great powers are on a quasi-war footing already, one misjudgement away from the chain of events that would shatter all economic assumptions.”

In the “brave new world of 2014,” Evans-Pritchard continued, it was no longer “Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, but history returning in tooth and claw.”

The two newspaper articles are among many such commentaries comparing the deepening conflict between the US and China to the tensions between Germany and Great Britain in the lead-up to the outbreak of World War I.

Warning that the friction of rival nationalisms and historical grievances were “no less capable of causing war today than they were in 1914”, the Financial Times noted that “the risks are especially acute if the international system is being reordered by the rise of new great powers and the relative decline of old ones.” A century ago Germany was seeking its “place in the sun” at the expense of the British empire. Now, increasing tensions in the East China Sea between Beijing and its neighbours, which rely on US support, “recall Germany’s strained relations with Britain, France and Russia before 1914.”

AI FORCE ASSOCIATION HQ: For more than 60 years, most Americans have thought of nuclear weapons as an all-or-nothing game. The only way to win is not to play at all, we believed, because any use of nukes will lead to Armageddon. That may no longer be the game our opposition is playing. As nuclear weapons proliferate to places that might not share our reluctance to use them in small numbers, however, the US military may face a “second nuclear age” of retail Armageddon for which it is utterly unprepared.

Outside the US, both established and emerging nuclear powers increasingly see nuclear weapons as weapons that can be used in a controlled, limited, and strategically useful fashion, said Barry Watts, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, arguably the Pentagon’s favorite thinktank. The Cold War “firebreaks” between conventional and nuclear conflict are breaking down, he wrote in a recent report. Russia has not only developed new, relatively low-yield tactical nukes but also routinely wargamed their use to stop both NATO and Chinese conventional forces should they overrun Moscow’s feeble post-Soviet military, Watts said this morning at the headquarters of the Air Force Association. Pakistan is likewise developing tactical nukes to stop India’s much larger military. Iran seeks nuclear weapons not only to offset Israel’s but to deter and, in the last resort, fend off an American attempt to perform “regime change” in Tehran the way we did in Baghdad. The US Air Force and Navy concept of “AirSea Battle” in the Western Pacific could entail strikes on the Chinese mainland that might provoke a nuclear response.

It’s precisely because US conventional power is so overwhelming that the temptation to turn to nuclear weapons to redress the balance is so irresistible. Ten years ago, the Iraqis sidestepped American dominance in the middle of the spectrum of conflict – regular warfare with tanks, planes, and precision-guided non-nuclear weapons – by going low and waging guerrilla warfare, for which the US proved painfully unprepared. In the future, nuclear proliferation means more and more countries will have the option to sidestep US conventional power by going high and staging a “limited” nuclear attack, for which we aren’t really prepared either. Indeed, some countries, notably a nuclear Iran with its terrorist proxies and North Korea with its criminal ties and special operations forces, could outflank America’s conventional military from both sides at once.