The head of the U.S. Strategic Command told Congress last week that a powerful set of countries is ganging up against the United States and World War III is on the horizon.
General Anthony Cotton’s testimony didn’t receive much attention from the U.S. press, other than some breathless coverage from conservative outlets eager to emphasize the weakness of the Biden administration and the necessity of boosting the U.S. military budget.
Though under-reported, the general’s comments are a useful window onto the Pentagon’s worldview. They reveal the increasingly Cold War thinking that is developing in Washington, which mirrors the hardening of attitudes in Moscow.
Such talk of “us versus them” is but the latest sign that the world has been thrown back to 1946. It was 78 years ago this week that former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his infamous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. At that time, an international community that had recently been conjured into existence with the formation of the United Nations was threatening to cleave into two spheres, Communist and non-Communist. Churchill, among others, pushed hard to reinforce this division.
Today, a similar chasm has opened up between what Vladimir Putin calls the “collective West” and his preferred axis of allies including China, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. But how united are these two respective spheres? Is war inevitable between them?
In 1946, irrevocable conflict between Moscow and Washington was not a foregone conclusion. Strategic diplomacy could have averted the Cold War, or at least, softened the confrontation. Perhaps lessons from the origins of that great twentieth-century divide can help the world avoid embarking on another decades-long global ideological slugfest.
In February, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Turner (R-OH) made a mysterious statement about a “serious national security threat” that generated a lot of media attention. It turned out to be information about a new Russian capabilityto attack U.S. satellites with nuclear weapons. Turner insists that he dropped his bombshell to wake up the Biden administration to a new threat, though it seems more likely that he was simply trying to prod his fellow House Republicans to support the most recent bill to provide military assistance to Ukraine.
General Cotton’s subsequent testimony came in part because Congress wants reassurance that Russia has not opened up a technological advantage over the United States. And indeed, Cotton went into great detail on what the United States is doing to maintain an edge. But not all of his words were reassuring:
Today, the United States, its Allies, and partners continue to be confronted by two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries: the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation. We are also faced with the growing nuclear threat posed by the Democratic........© Eurasia Review