We are now, once again, living in the preliminary phase of an international confrontation that will rapidly evolve into a world war if the democracies do not shore up nuclear and conventional deterrence against territorial conquest. Full spectrum nuclear and conventional deterrence and Soviet appreciation of the costs of war kept the Cold War stand-off from escalating into a Third World War. However, nuclear deterrence will not on its own prevent World War III (over either Ukraine, Taiwan, the Straits of Hormuz, or the Korean peninsula), just as the prospect of incendiary and nerve gas assault against European capitals by bomber fleets did not deter the outbreak of the Second World War.

Instead, German leader Adolf Hitler chose to fight by armored conquest, and all of his adversaries complied. World Wars are never an intention of foreign policy. Instead, they escalate from failed attempts at a quick land grab by authoritarian states in the face of an unprepared and slowly coalescing democratic coalition. Washington must be on the lookout for deterrence crises in these minor theatres, as war will not start with an immediate Russian attack on Poland or even a direct Chinese amphibious landing on Taiwan’s coast.

Despite the enormous death toll among soldiers and non-combatants, neither the First nor Second World Wars had actually satisfied the complete definition of total war or reached Karl von Clausewitz’s definition of an absolute war. The First World War began, for both the Central Powers and democratic Allies, as quick campaigns, primarily focused on Berlin blocking the interference of France in German Imperial designs in Ukraine. Neutral world opinion likely deterred the use of gas against population centers in 1915 and thereafter, despite the war resembling a total effort in almost every other respect.

The reason the widely predicted incendiary and gas bomber attacks against the respective capitals of Paris, Berlin, and London never took place at the outbreak of the Second World War was that Hitler intended to achieve victory through a series of limited and rapid fait accompli conquests, including, in sequence, Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, and Poland in September, France in May of 1940, and culminating in a victory over Moscow by the end of 1941. In his 1938 Germany and a Lightning War, Fritz Sternberg argued that the experience of the First World War showed that Germany, even with its military-technical expertise, could not win a protracted total war. It was conceivable that an under-industrialized Russia could be........

© The National Interest