Has World War III Started?
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/opinion/america-ukraine-war-russia.html?searchResultPosition=171
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stand-up-to-bullies-and-defend-taiwan-select-committee-ip-theft-human-rights-uyghurs-hard-power-jinping-aa34bd85
The Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Chinese incursion (incursions?) over the airspace of the United States and Canada may be preludes to the next world war. Why do I say that?
Putin is pretty much doing what Hitler did when he started to gobble up countries in Europe before he formally invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. There is an absolute aversion of NATO’s direct entrance into the conflict, but it’s only a matter of time before Putin declares the gifted tanks sufficient to call Germany and the United States formal combatants and declare war against NATO.
It is just as clear that China is gearing up to invade Taiwan to reclaim land it believes is its own just as Putin is trying to piece the Soviet Union back together again.
There is only one force capable of stopping this aggression before it sucks the whole world into another conflagration. That is the United States of America.
President Biden has said he sees Taiwan as a free country whose sovereignty we would defend if China invades. Get ready, Joe. It’s going to happen. You need to use the time you have now to arm the Taiwanese to the teeth and train them to repel what will likely be a combined air and sea invasion by the Chinese Communist armed forces.
Similarly, the United States has tried to stay out of direct confrontation with Russia by supplying the Ukrainians with weaponry along with our NATO allies. How much support will it take before the Russians decide that we are no longer a surrogate but the actual enemy? Support for Ukraine is waning in the United States, especially on the right. As David French outlines in The New York Times on February 20, we cannot go “wobbly” on the Ukrainians. The fate of the world as we know it depends on America’s support for Ukraine.
NATO and the United States as well as Japan, India, Australia and a whole lot of the world are running headlong into the combined aspirations of Russia and China to acquire land that they believe is rightly theirs. Add Iran and you have a real “axis of evil.”
The United Nations seems completely incapable of dealing with any of this (even on the small scale of the West Bank) and the United States, as it did in the run-up to World War II is doing everything to help those in the line of fire without sending our own troops in. It is unclear when or where the Pearl Harbor moment will occur, but I fear that it will either be in Ukraine or Taiwan, or both at once.
Now is the time for pre-emption. As I said before, we need to arm and train the Taiwanese to make any invasion far more costly for Communist China than it would be at present. Similarly, we may as well give the Ukrainians what they need in the way of military hardware, tanks, and jet planes in a last-ditch attempt to drain Putin of the financial means to go any farther.
The lessons of history are pretty clear. If you want to get a bully’s attention, you may well have to punch him in the nose. The United States and NATO have to make it clear to Putin that the cost of further incursions is too great a price for him to pay all the while realizing that both Russia and China are nuclear powers and that card could be played at any time—even by North Korea.
It is a very dangerous world out there. So far, other than in Afghanistan, President Biden has done a good job keeping us safe, but the stalling in Ukraine and the wishing and hoping in the South China Sea cannot last much longer. Now is the time to spend extra treasure to arm our allies so we don’t have to spend American blood later.
2 thoughts on “Has World War III Started?”
The current State Department and Department of Defense, including the Chair of the Joint Chief, are led by extraordinary leaders. I am confident that they are working closely with Biden to continue to win in Ukraine and to repel China in Taiwan. Keep in mind that NO Russian or Chinese office or general has any substantial war experience while our military leaders have plenty. The Russians are going to tire of body bags coming home. And, if Putin makes any move with tactical nuclear weapons, NATO is preparing to do what Napoleon and Hitler could not, defeat a clearly incompetent Russian Army. In addition, the Chinese are tired of the Pandemic shambles there and will NOT have the “fire in the belly” to win on Taiwan. The United States needs to continue to elect presidents who support NATO and a strong military force, i.e. NOT Trump or DeSantis.
I am not quite so optimistic because the American public is only 50% behind the Ukraine support effort. Watch the right make this an election issue just as the right tried to keep us from helping the Brits before WWII. It is truly amazing that the conservatives are against our supporting our allies, but they all think that NATO has not thrown in enough support. Well, NATO is doing its part now when the chip are down.