Is the absence so far of a Third World War akin to a miracle?
Climate change is widely viewed as the mightiest threat to humanity, but in the hierarchy of threats we face, is a Third World War still the most dangerous?
Each of today’s three greatest military powers – the United States, China and Russia – holds a very large population and extensive territory and belongs to a geographically distinctive entity. In trying to predict the most powerful nations in tomorrow’s world, geography will remain a determinant.
The three aforementioned nations differ from any other dominating trio in the world’s history. Whereas in the 19th century (and even in the two world wars) most of the great powers tended to possess small homelands and many overseas colonies, these three giants of the digital age are essentially land powers on an immense scale. The vastness of territory possessed by the US, China and Russia far exceeds that of any other important nation today.
Inside the powerful three, Russia’s place seems the most vulnerable according to another measurement. Today, its total wealth does not even allow it a seat in the world’s top 10 nations, despite its economic recovery since the year 2000. On the other hand, President Putin is entitled to reply that he still commands one of the world’s top nuclear powers.
Two other great powers are the European Union and India. Heartland Europe, a major economic power, no longer exerts the military strength it exerted in 1914 and 1939. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has relied heavily on the US for its defence. As for India, it now has the largest population in the world. As India has avoided long and costly wars, its impressive military strength has escaped intense attention; the six wars that India fought in its initial half-century (1947-1997) caused a mere 13,000 deaths in its armed forces. By 2024 it had the second largest army in the world and the seventh largest stockpile of nuclear warheads. Its closest ally is Russia and certainly not China.
Will a sixth warrior giant arise in the next century? It is unlikely to be a big landmass power; adequate territory is not readily available. But eventually a small or low-ranking nation in military terms – even a Switzerland or Sweden – could become a mighty power simply by its inventiveness. In recorded history the very small countries such as ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence must be ranked among the most innovative. Likewise in the period 1480-1630 such small-area nations as Portugal, Spain, Holland, Britain and France, and Germany some centuries later, gained a mastery of distant oceans. They increased their military strength by conquering remote lands and acquiring their harbours. Even Denmark and Belgium and Norway, with no notable navy, possessed valuable colonies or territorial claims across the seas. The existence of five great powers, or even six, adds complication. Is agreement harder to reach when five or six leaders, rather than three, meet in secret conference? The answer is not certain.
Leaders must make effective predictions of how outside nations will behave if war should occur; will the outsiders be our allies or our enemies? Alliances, being all-important, have to be formed and consolidated in advance. China knows how vulnerable an alliance can be. An enemy of Japan, it had been a vital ally of the US during World War II. Then in 1949, the newly communist China rejoiced that Russia now superseded the US as its main ally. As a result, a long communist domain stretched all the way west from the China Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean. No comparable domain had previously existed – so far as we know – in world history. From Hong Kong to the hinterland of Venice stood a wide and unbroken communist corridor. How suddenly it vanished!
The two Red friends, China and Russia, not only started to fall out in 1960 – they fought one another. Almost forgotten is the war waged just eight years later along the Ussuri River, a border that separated China and Russia in far-east Asia. The war was serious but no victor emerged.
Another four years passed, and in 1972 China and the US were now friends if not allies. In that year the visit of President Nixon to China and the simmering and then glowing friendship between Beijing and Washington are usually depicted as an American initiative; but it was equally a Chinese invitation. Here commenced one of the most epoch-making somersaults in the world’s political history.
Now, under new leaders, incentives were injected into economic life. Silicon Valley became a kind of sperm donor to new-age businesses in Shanghai and other Chinese cities. It was America that gladly fostered China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001, thus enabling an avalanche of manufactured goods to flow from China into the world’s markets and American homes. In 2017 Donald Trump became president of the US partly because he won votes from its old industrial districts, which had been strangled by cheap Chinese-manufactured goods.
Early in this century China rearmed vigorously, and a large navy designed to match that of the US was built. Defying an international court, President Xi Jinping began treating the South China Sea as his nation’s own strategic possession. Small islands, and stretches of sand visible only at low tide, were converted into costly concrete airfields.
One of President Xi’s ambitions is to reunite Taiwan with mainland China, just 160km away. He instructs his armed forces to make daily, provocative stunts near Taiwan’s shores. His ambition to conquer or blockade Taiwan is intense. After all, Taiwan still possesses the treasures of the national museum, which once mesmerised visitors in Beijing. It also commands one of the world’s important sea routes, and controls a vital part of the trade in advanced computer chips. Will this wealthy newborn democracy soon be tamed by supposedly all-powerful China?
Late in 2024, Matt Pottinger’s book The Boiling Moat analysed the dangers to the US and its Pacific allies if Taiwan was invaded or effectively blockaded by Chinese armed forces. That war might prove to be more world-shaping than any war in the past 75 years.
A nation’s leaders have no alternative but to make forecasts. Sometimes they do see ahead with impressive foresight. Often, however, they fail in their predictions, for they are faced with what is almost unpredictable: they are expected to look too far ahead. For instance, which skilled scholars or experienced generals in 1920 correctly predicted that both Russia and China would remain as communist nations a century later? Equally significant, who predicted that both nations would still preside over mighty land empires?
To over-emphasise the errors arising from predictions would be unfair to the whole military and strategy profession. No other major human activity is so affected by incoming news and rumours, by the daily waterfall of tumbled or sparklingly clear information, and the urgent need to analyse it and perhaps take preventive action. Few other major professions or activities are so impeded or aided by unexpected events.
Accurate knowledge is one of the key weapons in great-power warfare. In the 20th century the might of the strongest nations was frequently enhanced or endangered by the success or failure of their intelligence services.
Occasionally, on the eve of world-shaking wars, the intelligence received was accurate but the nation’s leaders rejected or misunderstood it. Thus the Soviet Union should not have been tricked by the sudden German invasion in 1941; Joseph Stalin had already been informed by his intelligence agencies that his ally, Adolf Hitler, was ready to invade Russia. This vital item of news was not believed in the Kremlin.
In December of the same year American intelligence agencies ignored clear signs that Japan was about to attack the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. In the week before that devastating attack, a US naval officer discovered a vital clue: the local Japanese consulate in Hawaii was busy burning documents on a large scale. It was such a demanding task for the staff that the talkative cook was answering the phone. There were other clues of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but the US was still taken by surprise.
Half a year later, a turning point of the war in the Pacific came from superior intelligence activities. The crushing US victory against Japanese aircraft carriers in the crucial Battle of Midway, an island in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, was achieved partly by intercepting the secret Japanese naval messages. It was the US intelligence service, atoning for past failures, that did much to destroy the Japanese aircraft carriers.
In 1945, towards the end of the Second World War, the Japanese had no knowledge of the existence of the atomic bombs that were about to devastate two of their cities. The US had taken countless steps to safeguard the secrecy of these momentous weapons, but it later transpired that it unknowingly employed inside its top-secret workplaces three Soviet spies. Moscow secretly learned of the existence and nature of the atomic bomb, and in 1947 actually manufactured one. Here began a crucial stage of what was called the Cold War.
An intelligence episode or mishap shaped the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the US and the Soviet Union seemed to be on the verge of fighting a nuclear war. Russia’s leaders had decided to exploit the communist island of Cuba as a base from which long-distance missiles might be launched against numerous American cities and military bases. It believed that secrecy was attainable, and that much of Cuba’s countryside was clad with palm trees which would conceal the Soviet missile sites and camouflage the tent towns being created nearby. The belief was totally mistaken, but for months the so-called secrecy seemed to succeed. More than 40,000 Soviet servicemen had quietly arrived in Cuba before one of the new missile sites was discovered by an American reconnaissance aircraft. Here was a failure of intelligence on both sides. And yet, almost miraculously, a world war was averted.
The Arab terrorist attack on New York in September 2001 reflected other failures at American headquarters. Most of the hijackers had been welcomed as visitors to the US: 13 of the 19 carried visas entitling them to be there.
Likewise in October 2023, at the Israeli music festival and nearby farms, the deaths and kidnappings reflected a grave failure in Israel’s intelligence services and a bold success for those of Hamas and Iran.
In writing the first edition of my book The Causes of War more than half a century ago, I did not appreciate the vital role of intelligence and counterintelligence in the beginning and ending of wars. In its very last pages my book declared that in deciding for war or peace, national leaders are strongly influenced by seven crucial factors.
They are: military strength; predictions of how outside nations will behave if war should occur; perceptions of whether there is internal unity or discord in their land and in the land of the enemy; knowledge or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war; nationalism and ideology; the state of the economy and also its ability to sustain the kind of war envisaged; and the personality and experience of those who shared in the decision.
At the end of the new edition of the book, I have belatedly added the role of intelligence as an eighth factor.
Why have the Earth’s peoples, at this time of writing, not experienced a third world war? Its absence – or its postponement – is partly the result of the existence of nuclear weapons, and the fear that a nuclear war might prove to be unwinnable. But a nuclear war presumably can have many varieties, and might even be a war in which a smallish nuclear weapon is employed, and employed only once.
Is it possible that another peacemaking factor is the military decline of Europe? For so long the theatre of the majority of major wars, Europe experienced only one really fatal war – the Bosnian War in 1992-95 – during the three-quarters of a century commencing with the momentous year of 1945.
In that same period, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal – all European nations – fought far from home against “colonial liberation uprisings” in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Fortunately, the combined casualties from these wars were small. Admittedly, in the same long period, the intense civil wars fought in Rwanda and several other African nations caused deaths on a massive scale.
Even more significant has been the decline of Germany. Here was a mighty nation, no longer powerful. Its decline – and indirectly the military decline of Europe – must briefly be dissected. In 1900, Germany had so many advantages, including an outstanding army and the second largest navy in the world. In intellectual life and industrial inventiveness, it possibly was ranked equal first with Britain. It had one conspicuous need: if only it possessed a major oilfield and a high-grade deposit of black coal!
Ultimate defeat in the First World War taught Germany a vital lesson. In the 1930s its new leader Adolf Hitler resolved that, to succeed in war, Germany must manufacture its own oil. So for a variety of causes, but especially scarce oil and certainly overconfidence, Germany lost the war. Leaving aside the prolonged deadlock in the Cold War, no factor has done so much to make Europe peaceful in the years since 1945, because Germany, once the master warrior, was compelled by the victors to disarm. When, after nearly half a century, it was permitted to rearm, it did so hesitantly.
It is fair to suggest that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was facilitated by the reluctance of Germany, and France too, to spend adequately on defence during the previous quarter century. Indeed, when Putin launched his invasion – a dramatic event in the assessing of military power – he felt confident that Europe’s combined armies would be primarily a spectator.
Almost equal in significance was the decline of that long-time naval power, Great Britain. Once possessing the world’s strongest naval and cargo fleets, it could no longer afford financially to be the strongest maritime power. So Europe continued to recede as the main theatre of warfare. Another factor aided the military decline of Europe and the resultant prospect of a longer period of peace for much of the world. The victors in the First World War allowed Germany, in the 1930s, to rearm. In contrast the victors of the Second World War learned their lesson and prevented Germany and Japan from rearming. While the victors aided the economic recovery of Germany and Japan, they prevented their military recovery until the danger, in their judgment, had passed.
The absence, so far, of a Third World War now seems akin to a miracle. A world war is far more destructive than any other category of war. We forget that another hallmark of a world war in the 20th century was the unpredictability of the trends and events it generated. Even the victorious nations in those world wars failed to achieve all their aims, and they ultimately witnessed consequences – mostly unwelcome – which their wartime leaders could not have imagined or expected.
Thus, in 1914, the major European nations did not go to war to achieve a Bolshevik revolution in Russia, to create an Irish Free State, to found a Jewish national home in Palestine or even to establish a League of Nations. And yet these were unexpected results of the war. We owe these valuable insights – obvious once they were printed in 1960 – to the Cambridge historian David Thomson. Other momentous but unexpected trends arising from the Second World War included the political decline of Europe and the rising role of Asia.
Innovations in warfare itself will not cease. Nuclear weapons are unlikely to remain permanently a main cause or symbol of dominance. They might be superseded by a weapon even more dynamic and dramatic, though less destructive of human life. The Chinese city of Wuhan in the winter of 2019-20 gave the world a hint of how a new biological weapon might arise in a research laboratory, accidentally or intentionally. Another innovation, perhaps the achievement of chemists rather than soldiers, might well be incredibly powerful, though simple. Maybe it will tranquillise and thereby conquer an enemy’s capital city, and its leaders too, for just a few crucial hours.
We tend to overlook the world’s successes and even its unprecedented achievements in the 70 years between 1950 and 2020. We forget that international war – along with disease – has been such an ubiquitous killer throughout much of human history. Therefore the absence of a Third World War was an astonishing gain of that period of 70 years.
Yet another gain was the increased longevity of human life through medical innovations and superior nutrition, and the massive increases in the output of food. Even in decades when global famine was predicted, even after the Club of Rome in the early 1970s accentuated that dismal prediction of famine, the world’s farmers and scientists disagreed. So far they have produced almost annually more grains and other foods than ever before.
That has created unforeseen problems, but it also has conferred on billions of humans the most remarkable of gifts: a life to be lived. Moreover, daily life now provides more opportunities and blessings than those available to a typical male and female life throughout the whole of human history.
Global catastrophes, however, can still occur, and in 2025, another world war is seen by numerous commentators as even more to be feared than climate change.
The Causes of War, first published in 1973, is among Geoffrey Blainey’s most influential books. This is an edited extract of an updated edition, published on July 29 through Scribner Australia
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