Wars start through any number of pathways: One world war happened through deliberate action, the other was a crisis that spun out of control. Many Chinese officers have begun to lament out loud what they call “peace disease,” their term for never having served in combat. But it points to how the global context is changing. policymakers and a highly nationalist domestic audience: A 2014 poll by the Perth U.S.-Asia center found that 74% of Chinese think their military would win in a war with the U.S.
This may be a bit of posturing both for U.S. “A U.S.-China war is inevitable” recently warned the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper after recent military face-offs over rights of passage and artificial islands built in disputed territory. The worry is that the brewing 21st century Cold War with China and its junior partner Russia could at some point turn hot. Indeed, it’s likely China’s alleged recent hack of federal records at the Office of Personnel Management was not about cyber crime, but a classic case of what is known as “preparing the battlefield,” gaining access to government databases and personal records just in case. China built more warships and warplanes than any other nation during the last several years, while the Pentagon just announced a strategy to “offset” it with a new generation of high-tech weapons. and a newly powerful and assertive China are engaged in a massive arms race. Russian land grabs in Ukraine and constant flights of bombers decorated with red stars probing Europe’s borders have put NATO at its highest levels of alert since the mid 1980s. Yet that risk of the past has made a dark comeback. But at the start of the 21st century, the ever-present fear of World War III seemed to be in our historic rearview mirror. Great power conflicts defined the 20th century: Two world wars claimed tens of millions of lives, and the Cold War that followed shaped everything from geopolitics to sports.
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