A Hot War in Hot Places
A Hot War in A Hot Place
The world is back at war. I launched this column on October 29th, 2021, arguing that “WWIII Has Already Started”; we didn’t recognize it. We could not see that the warring parties had already chosen sides and lined up. We couldn’t see that the nature of war itself had changed. Instead, many assumed that I meant a repeat of WW1 and WWII, even though I argued that WWIII would happen more through technology than through hand-to-hand fighting. The war in Ukraine confirmed that assumption and distracted attention from the many other events that revealed the already global conflict among the superpowers. Ukraine has dead, injured, and photo ops, which aligns with the old media rule: “If it bleeds, it leads.” But, it is merely a symptom of a much larger problem. There is also Hot War in Cold Places – Space, the Arctic and in the cold oceans. Satellites have been damaged and destroyed, the subsea cables that allow them to connect to Earth have been cut, and many undersea internet cables (Svalbard) and subsea energy infrastructure have been attacked in the high North (Nordstream II and Balticonnector). There is also the Cold War in Hot Places across Africa and the Pacific where Western intelligence believe that Russia and China are supporting uprisings, civil conflicts and jockeying with the West for influence over small but strategically valuable nations from Mali to The Solomon Islands. The US and NATO are contending with Russian-backed events across Africa and with China’s efforts to persuade the island nations of the Pacific to allow China to build military bases and commercial influence (Island (S)hopping). Now, after the events in Israel, the world faces a Hot Wars in Hot Places, namely across the Middle East. But, this is not just the Middle East. The megacities of the West are now facing the risk that this regional conflict metastasizes into a problem already being hotly felt in local neighborhoods globally. The lack of an overarching narrative to explain the larger confrontation between the superpowers is preventing proper diagnosis and resolution of the geopolitical problem.
Instead, all eyes remain focused on the obvious and incredibly hard questions: Can we, meaning the US, the West, and NATO, afford to support both Israel and Ukraine? Should we support either? Can either conflict be won? These profound questions take up all the oxygen, leaving no breathing space for the larger, harder questions: Can we remain locked in a contest with an aligned China and Russia that involves many different fronts from space to the high seas and across many different geographies? There is no way to answer any of the questions without first understanding that WWIII is not like WWI or WWII. It is not even like the land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This war is all domains everywhere all at once. This war is also what they call “grey zone/hybrid warfare,” meaning that the pain is not inflicted only with war machines like tanks, planes, guns, and rockets. In this new kind of warfare, the weaponization of food and energy prices is far more effective in hurting the civilian populations. Damaging Ukraine’s food production and distribution creates vastly more pain and problems for the West than any tank ever could.
Technology has also changed the nature of warfare. We used to think having bigger and better and more weapons was the answer. We built vast nuclear weapons stockpiles based on this (MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction) belief. But, faced with President Putin’s constant bombardment in Ukraine, using second-rate and old-fashioned tanks, guns, and bombs, we now realize the nuclear weapons arsenal is