By Seth Cropsey
Thursday, November 09, 2023
With the Middle East primed for a
conflagration, American policy-makers must recognize two realities. First, the
United States is embroiled in a major Eurasian rimland war, one that must be
fought and won to preserve American power. Second, the benefits of fighting
forward — and fighting limited small wars rather than purely focusing on “the
biggest threat” in Asia — are on full display in the Middle East today. The
U.S. must stay the course in Europe and the Middle East to win the struggle for
Eurasian mastery.
Russia, China, and Iran have forged an entente with clear
resemblance to the Axis of the mid 20th century. These new revisionist powers
share a number of strategic objectives with their historical forerunners. They
chafe under the restrictions of an international system that refuses to grant
authoritarian states the right to aggrandize themselves at the expense of
smaller neighbors. They seek to dominate their regions to ensure their
long-term economic control over the world around them, primarily for domestic
purposes. And they espouse ideologies — Russian national fascism with its
syncretic blend of racial hierarchy and Soviet nostalgia, Iranian Khomeinism
with its universalist demands and antisemitism, Chinese totalitarianism with a
cult of personality — that are inimical to liberalism, representative
government, and prudent and balanced rule.
The revisionist powers have a series of unmistakable
coordination problems, however. This is natural for actors with structurally
similar but intellectually distinct ideologies and, in turn, an unbounded
desire for power and expansion. Again, they resemble the 20th century’s
revisionists, a coalition equally divided over fundamental strategic questions.
Until the Nazi invasion of France, Italy strongly considered defecting from the
Axis. Mussolini’s essential failure was his lack of recognition that the German
partnership severely limited his freedom of action. Japan, despite having
joined the Berlin Pact, looked with unease at German escalation against the
Soviet Union. The Soviets, meanwhile, were squarely within the revisionist camp
and joined the Allies only by virtue of necessity after the Nazis invaded the
USSR. Otherwise, Stalin would have been content to let the Germans topple
England while the Soviets dealt with Japan separately.
Of the three ideologies, only Iranian Khomeinism has
legitimate universalist appeal, by virtue of its religious bent. Russian
national fascism is too rooted in Soviet symbolism, mythologized Russian
history, and Slavic-Aryan racial theories to attract long-term support beyond
the Russkiy mir (the ideologically and geographically defined
“Russian world”) and receives limited support within it. Chinese
totalitarianism has yet to transcend the specter of Mao Zedong. Even if Xi
Jinping is a committed Stalinist in practice, in principle he and his
intellectual coterie grasp the need to articulate an alternative to Maoist or
Stalinist communism, given the emptiness of post-1970s Marxism.
The result is that, while all three powers can be
extraordinarily flexible in their choice of partners, Russia and China cannot
but view each other with suspicion, since neither can articulate a framework
that accommodates the other’s role. Both revert to discussion of
“multipolarity” and “democracy,” by which they mean an international system
that protects illiberalism and leaves will to power unchecked. This allows for
tactical partnerships with Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and increasingly
Pakistan and Brazil, for either legitimate ideological or cynical political
reasons, along with growing coordination with one another and with Iran. But
mutual suspicion remains paramount.
Far weaker than China economically and, at this point,
militarily, Russia seeks to avoid vassal status even as it maintains a strong
relationship with Beijing. Indeed, while Chinese electronics are essential to
sustaining Russian economic and military capabilities — and while China
undoubtedly would see Russian success in Ukraine as furthering its own
objectives — Russia has resisted providing China with access to its territories
in the High North and, equally critically, turned increasingly to North Korea and
Iran for sustainment. Russia and China are not currently at odds in Central
Asia, but at some point the vast resources compressed between Beijing and
Moscow, combined with the proclivity of regional capitals to balance between
poles, will spark friction. Moreover, it is very unlikely that Russia wants to
play second fiddle to China. The grandiose Russian mission of supposedly saving
civilization from Western decadence and Nazism already rings hollow. Serving as
China’s decrepit gas station would be all the more humiliating.
The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, tacitly supports
Russia’s war in Ukraine only for instrumental reasons and has been consistently
circumspect in its approach to European affairs. The U.S. and Europe have
signaled strongly enough that they support Ukrainian sovereignty and see Russia
as a threat to convince China that unequivocal support for Russia would trigger
a profound economic decoupling, with economic consequences at least as severe
for China as for the West. A decoupling is probable, regardless of whether
China moves against Taiwan. But the CCP must balance its desire to snap the
American regional security system with the recognition that China is in the
middle of an economic crisis, which is symptomatic of a more severe
sociopolitical crisis stemming from low birth rates, a shrinking population,
and a materialist-capitalist culture, embraced by urban Chinese, that generally
eschews martial sacrifice despite the attempt by Xi Jinping Thought to
inculcate an appetite for national struggle. Moreover, there is an obvious
incentive in Beijing to weaken Russian cohesion. If Moscow understands that
China’s goal is to make it an imperial vassal, then the CCP must play its hand
with care. Vassal status requires that Russia be weak enough to accept manipulation and be
psychologically broken or co-opted enough to pretend that subjugation is in
fact power. While an opportunity for China to overturn the American security
order may arise in the future, it does not exist at present
and will come into view only if Russia is exhausted enough in Ukraine.
Historically, Iran and Russia have had friction over
objectives in the Levant. Iran sees its Levantine expansion as a springboard to
dominance of the ummah (the global Muslim community). Russia’s
position in the Middle East, by contrast, is oriented strictly toward Europe.
It could disrupt the U.S. alliance system and place high-value military assets
in the region to stress NATO’s southern flank. Today, Iran is the most crucial
of Russia’s partners, given its role in the sanctions-evasion pipeline and its
provision of military technology to Moscow. Yet regardless of the outcome of
the Ukraine war, Iran’s aggrandizement poses an obvious threat to Russian leverage
over oil markets and to Moscow’s ability to dictate terms in its relationship
with Tehran. And if Iran can dominate the Middle East and forge the ummah into
a coherent political unit, it will have tools to disrupt and co-opt Russia’s 14
million Muslims, as well as Muslims in Central Asia.
Alliance coordination is difficult for democracies and dictatorships.
But democracies have the essential advantage of open and intelligible political
systems that mitigate fear and misperception, something that dictatorships lack
by design. Russia, China, and Iran know that parceling out the spoils of America’s
Eurasian position would not be enough to satisfy each power. Even if the
revisionists were victorious, conflict among them would be guaranteed, meaning
that the advantages the revisionists gain by coordination now would be offset
by the dangers of supporting a potential near-future adversary.
***
This is relevant because of the demands
that strategic sequencing place on foreign and defense policy.
Great powers must, in some manner, prioritize among threats. Even the
20th-century U.S., industrial titan though it was, could not sustain with equal
resources the European and Asian theaters of the Second World War. America
faces three revisionists today. It can defeat all three if it
acts in concert with its allies, but it cannot wage three high-intensity wars
at once.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine and Iran’s developing assault
on Israel, of which the Hamas massacres on October 7 were the probable opening
move, are both gambits for regional power. Russia still seeks to absorb Ukraine
(and along with it Moldova and Belarus), dominate the Caucasus, peel Turkey off
from the Western camp, and take the Baltic states, thereby creating a
political-economic bloc capable of challenging the West directly. Iran is
waging a war of attrition against Israel that is meant to soak it in casualties
and destroy its economy. By destroying the Jewish state’s political foundations
and, concurrently, attacking U.S. installations throughout the Middle East,
Iran hopes to gain Islamic control of Jerusalem and use it — and its victory
over the U.S.–Israeli alliance — to attract all manner of Islamists to its
banner, catapulting it to leadership of the Islamic world.
Counterfactuals are undeniably impossible to prove. Yet
the reasonable observer of international events can compare the current
situation with an alternative in which the U.S. did not support
Ukraine’s struggle against Russia and Moscow overran Ukraine in a few months.
Iran would have moved against Israel at some point. Although it is unknowable
whether the barbarism of October 7 would have been replicated in another time
line, the irreducible antagonism between the imperialist Iranian theocracy and
the nationalist Jewish democracy made war inevitable.
Absent the current European war of its own making, the
Russian military would still have free forces capable of expeditionary
deployment, including missile-armed warships and modern attack submarines,
strike aircraft, and mobile air defenses. It would also have an airborne force
of four divisions and three brigades, along with several special-operations
units able to deploy quickly to an adjacent theater. And Russia’s presence in
Syria would remain robust. It is entirely conceivable that a Russia unconstrained
by the Ukraine war would be capable of deploying strategically significant air
and ground forces to the Levant and naval forces to the eastern Mediterranean
in a manner akin to the 1973 Arab–Israeli War.
In 1973, the Soviets surged naval assets to the eastern
Mediterranean, ultimately deploying nearly 100 warships and submarines to
pressure the U.S. Sixth Fleet. Soviet and U.S. forces constantly probed each
other, conducting an intense reconnaissance competition that both sides saw as
a prelude to open warfare. Soviet operational and technical advisers supported
Egyptian and Syrian forces throughout the war. Soviet commandos executed raids
on Israeli territory to capture Israel’s Western-supplied military equipment.
And Soviet pilots disguised as Egyptians or Syrians may well have flown combat
missions, much as disguised Soviet pilots fought in Korea. Moreover, the
Soviets seriously and credibly threatened to intervene against Israel, placing
the Soviet Airborne Corps on high alert, embarking Soviet marines and
transporting them to the eastern Mediterranean, and increasing the readiness of
tactical air forces in the southern USSR.
The point of the intervention would have been to rescue
Egyptian forces from certain destruction. After the first cease-fire broke
down, the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army and were just 60 miles
from Cairo. The Soviets would not have accepted the military and political
humiliation of a major regional ally. The United States’ response, putting U.S.
nuclear forces at DEFCON 3, convinced the USSR of American resolve, defusing
the crisis. But a Moscow more willing to take risks might well have sparked a
hot war.
A similar move today, if Russia had the forces to make
it, would have different objectives. Rather than trying to rescue an
overextended ally, the Russians would seek a contest of strength, daring the
U.S. to come to Israel’s aid in the face of Russian military power. Absent the
damage the Ukraine war has caused, Russia could almost certainly put together a
surface action group of several cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. Its Kilo-class
submarines could deploy to the eastern Mediterranean. It could surge fighter
and strike aircraft to positions in Syria, along with air defenses meant to
prevent an Israeli first strike and make an American move against Syria
prohibitively costly short of all-out war. Its airborne forces could be placed
on high alert for rapid airlift into Syria as well, potentially menacing U.S.
positions in Syria and Iraq. Wagner Group mercenaries working with Russian
military intelligence could hammer American bases throughout the region. And
all the while, one could expect a steady stream of Russian nuclear threats.
It is entirely unclear how this contest of strength would
play out. Such a deployment would display the same Russian qualitative and
logistical problems seen in Ukraine today. But in any case, the U.S. would be
less combat-ready absent the Ukraine war, while Europe, currently divided over
its response to the Middle East crisis, would speak with one voice against
American intervention.
Today, Russian ground and airborne forces have been
mauled in nearly two years of brutal combat through a marriage between
Ukrainian skill and heroism and Western arms. Russia’s tactical air forces are
badly damaged. Its strike aircraft are overwhelmingly dedicated to operations
in Ukraine. Its navy is unable either to leave port or to transit from the
Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And it has no spare air and missile defenses
that it could rush to Syria to disrupt an Israeli or American offensive move.
The Middle Eastern crisis is likely to escalate, at
minimum through an Iranian-planned, Hezbollah-executed rocket bombardment of
Israeli infrastructure and population centers, and potentially through a ground
incursion into the Golan Heights. Attacks on U.S. bases and warships have
already begun and will continue. Yet however brutal this war becomes, the U.S.
will not need to deal with a second Eurasian revisionist intervening
militarily. Indeed, Russia’s only response to the current Middle Eastern crisis
has been to deploy a handful of aircraft armed with hypersonic missiles to
patrol the Black Sea, a move meant to spark hysterics in the Western
commentariat, not to shift the military balance.
***
America’s adversaries can choose the time and
place of their attacks on the U.S. security structure in the Eurasian rimland.
But the U.S. also can manipulate the situation. By sustaining Ukraine, the U.S.
has ground down Russian capabilities and thereby provided the U.S. far more strategic
flexibility in the Middle East. Similarly, neutralizing Iranian capabilities in
the coming months will make it far easier for the U.S. to sustain the
Indo-Pacific balance in the coming years.
The Indo-Pacific balance is, of course, trending in the
wrong direction — China is more powerful in the region now than at any point in
history, making Chinese attempts to revise Indo-Pacific political arrangements
more probable. Yet the idea that China can hurl a bolt from the blue is
fanciful, given the sheer scale of the effort that would be needed to take
Taiwan even if the U.S. did not intervene. China may pursue a
phased strategy of pressure and disruption, such as increasingly deploying
naval vessels to circumnavigate Taiwan, sending fighters and bombers around the
island, and using merchant vessels like fishing trawlers to violate U.S.
partners’ territory. But this would carry risks as well — it would erode
People’s Liberation Army strategic and operational surprise. An all-out attack
rather than a gray-zone campaign — which does not use military instruments but
includes cyber, economic, and disinformation measures — likely would be
identified weeks to months prior, even during a period of pressure. Regardless,
then, an attentive United States can marshal its allies and mobilize for
conflict. America will have far more of these allies, and far more economic
potential to mobilize in a war, if it preserves a favorable balance in Europe
and the Middle East.
The alternative is to husband resources only for
the large war, a strategy the democracies pursued in the 1930s. British
appeasement stemmed primarily from a fear of major war, but the French
consistently convinced themselves that husbanding resources and biding time
would ultimately put Paris in a better position against Berlin. The result was
the fall of France and Hitler’s near-domination of Europe. The U.S. must take
note today and hold the line throughout the Eurasian rimland.
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