World Wars Don't Start All At Once
Last updated 10:07 AM EDT • Read time: 6m
Writing in the online journal 1945, Ted Galen Carpenter reminds us that world wars don’t start all at once. Carpenter cites reports that Russia is launching drone attacks in Poland and Germany, two NATO countries that have actively helped Ukraine launch similar attacks on Russia. He characterizes these acts of belligerency as “gray-zone warfare,” and warns that such actions are “inherently reckless” and “can easily get out of hand, leading to a cycle of escalation that culminates in full-scale warfare.” The actions on both sides, he writes, are part of a “geostrategic game of ‘chicken’” which should stop before we all go off a cliff “into an abyss.”
The abyss Carpenter warns about is an expanded war involving nuclear-armed powers. History is replete with regional wars and crises that escalate into global conflicts. In 1754, fighting between British colonists and French settlers, with their respective native-American allies, in the Ohio Valley ignited the Seven Years War that engulfed much of Europe and India until it ended in 1763. Many historians consider this the first global war. That war, as J.R. Seeley explained in The Expansion of England, was simply the latest in a series of 18th century wars between Britain and France for the control of North America. “These wars,” Seeley wrote, “group themselves very symmetrically, and the whole period stands out as an age of gigantic rivalry between England and France, a kind of second Hundred Years’ War.” The American War of Independence was also part of that larger geopolitical rivalry.
The cataract of history known as the French Revolution ignited more than two decades of warfare, which the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan grouped into the “Wars of the French Revolution and Empire.” A series of regional wars eventually grew into a world war which the United States was drawn into in what we refer to as the War of 1812, which saw the nation’s capital burned by British forces. The U.S. entered that war in response to the impressment of Americans on British and French warships. There were calls in Congress and elsewhere for declaring war on Britain and France, which would have been geopolitical madness. Our victory in that war was only made possible by Britain’s distraction in the larger war against Napoleon in Europe.
The 19th century witnessed the continuing struggle for mastery in Europe, which was so brilliantly examined by British historian A.J.P. Taylor in his book The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918. There were revolutions and wars throughout the period which could veery easily have escalated, but the conservative statesmen of the great powers—Metternich, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, Wellington, Palmerston, Disraeli, Bismarck, Witte, and others—prevented those wars and crises from spreading to other parts of the world. What began with the Concert of Europe was transformed after Italian and German unification in the 1860s and 1870s into a Bismarckian European order.
The First World War resulted from what George F. Kennan called the decline of Bismarck’s European order. A series of crises and conflicts in the early 1900s, which realist statesmen like Disraeli and Bismarck would have contained as they had at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, escalated into a global conflict. As Bismarck once predicted, some damn fool thing in the Balkans (the political assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife and a regional war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia) drew in all of the major European great powers, the British empire, Japan, and the United States. As Niall Ferguson explained in his masterful history The Pity of War, there was nothing inevitable about the Balkan troubles producing a global war. Foreign policy realism gave way to emotional and ideological sentiments that even the senseless carnage of the battlefields could not wipe away.
The Second World War also began as a series of separate regional conflicts, as Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in his book The Second World Wars. It started with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. Germany and the Soviet Union provided lethal aid to both sides in the Spanish Civil War beginning in 1936. Japan escalated its war with China in 1937 and fought a brief war with the Soviet Union in 1939. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. In 1940, the Soviet Union invaded Finland and occupied the Baltic states. In 1940, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, and waged war in the Atlantic and in the air against Britain. Britain and China were being aided by the United States. In 1941, Germany invaded Greece and Yugoslavia, then later launched Operation Barbarossa against Soviet Russia. Japan then attacked United States’ and British possessions in the Pacific. Germany and Italy then declared war against the United States.
The Cold War was a global geopolitical conflict that spawned regional wars and crises that could have resulted in World War III. The Berlin blockade and airlift in 1948, China’s Civil War in the late 1940s, Korea, the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s, Suez and Hungary in 1956, Berlin in the late 1950s-early 1960s, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Vietnam, the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and nationalist uprisings in Eastern-Central Europe in 1989-91, all had the potential to escalate into a global war. Each time, realism, reinforced by the prospect of nuclear annihilation, caused world leaders to step back from the brink.
The regional wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and the geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States and its allies in the western Pacific have the potential to converge and escalate into a global kinetic war. China, North Korea and Iran are aiding Russia in its war against Ukraine, while the U.S. and NATO allies, as Ted Galen Carpenter notes, are assisting Ukraine. Drone attacks on both sides of that conflict involve proxies who could become full-scale belligerents. The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has already escalated to other Middle Eastern countries. Should war break out in the western Pacific over Taiwan, it would likely involve the U.S., Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and perhaps even Vietnam.
Foreign policy realism is not as emotionally or as ideologically satisfying as publicly demonizing potential adversaries, exhibiting righteous indignation, or intellectually positioning yourself on the “right side of history.” Realists like Carpenter are often called appeasers of, and apologists for, dictators and autocrats. Foreign policy realpolitik is out of fashion among the foreign policy establishment whose members frequently confuse moralism with morality and suffer from hubris when expounding on international relations. It is a hubris that forgets the harm and misery that has often been caused by emotional and ideological crusades that have in the past transformed regional wars and crises into world wars. Bismarck, appropriately, gets the last word: “Man cannot control the current of events, he can only float with them and steer.”
Francis P. Sempa writes on geopolitics.