To discern the second and third- order effects of this crisis, half a century later, is not easy. One way to grasp their potential magnitude is to ask whether the former US defence secretary, Robert Gates, writing in Foreign Affairs before the onslaught on Israel, is right that: “The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own.”
The problem, Gates argued, is that at the very moment events demand a strong and coherent response from America, “the country cannot provide one”.
I have argued for five years that the United States and its allies already find themselves in a new cold war, this time with the People’s Republic of China. I have argued for a year and a half that the war in Ukraine is roughly equivalent to the Korean War during the first Cold War, revealing an ideological as well as geopolitical division between the countries of the “Rimland” (the Anglosphere, western Europe and Japan) and those of the Eurasian “Heartland” (China, Russia and Iran plus North Korea).
And I have warned since January that a war in the Middle East might be the next crisis in a cascade of conflict that has the potential to escalate to a Third World War, especially if China seizes the moment — perhaps as early as next year — to impose a blockade on Taiwan. Now that the Middle Eastern war has indeed broken out, what course will history take?
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