Military restraint isn’t working — peace through strength is the only option 

In the late 1930s, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan expanded their aggressive activities in Europe and Asia, respectively, and began collaborating on their mutual designs to upend the existing world order.    

In September of 1940, the three Axis Powers signed a treaty recognizing their respective leadership in the two theaters: Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Europe and Hideki Tojo’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.  

There are certain parallels to the international situation today.  

Over the last decade, communist China, revanchist Russia, Islamist Iran and dynastic communist North Korea have expanded their communications, trade and, most ominously, their exchanges of weapons, munitions and military technology, including missile and nuclear resources. 

Like the original Axis Powers, the four revisionist regimes share a fundamental fear and hatred of the liberal international order once led by Great Britain and France and now by the United States. 

In February 2022, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin formalized the collaborative China-Russia relationship with the declaration of a “no-limits strategic partnership” and announced the ideological basis for a new international order intended to supplant the Western system and its law- and values-based structures.   

With China’s seal of approval, Putin invaded Ukraine a few weeks later and launched the first major war in Europe since World War II, violating all the rules-based international norms established to keep the peace since 1945. 

The prospect that haunts President Joe Biden is a repetition of the last century’s devastation, with Russia’s criminal war on Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas fighting instigated by Iran becoming region-wide conflicts and escalating to World War III.       

It is a perfectly legitimate concern — indeed, a moral and mandatory one — for the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. But the burden of preventing that ultimate catastrophe rests on the shoulders of others as well, particularly on those who challenge the existing order and whose own survival would be at risk in a global conflict. The ultimate question for Western leaders is the perennial one: is accommodation or deterrence the surest way to restrain the ambitions of aggressive powers?  

The Free World must convince leaders in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Teheran that in a major war they will suffer the same fate as the last century’s aggressors: total destruction of their regimes. That is the outcome Hamas now faces after its criminal attack on Israel and its infliction of death and destruction on the Palestinian people. 

Today’s would-be imposers of a new world order probably do not doubt the West’s capabilities to inflict fatal damage to the prospects of their success and survival, though they may count on the diffusion of Western resources across several fronts.   

Even before the Israel-Hamas conflict erupted, many Americans — including some in Congress and the Biden administration — worried that military resources expended in Ukraine would not be available for the looming conflict with China over Taiwan.  

That concern has now been compounded and preempted by the Middle East fighting, as the West finds itself confronted with two simultaneous threats to the international order. When North Korea and/or China drop(s) another boot, the West’s long-under-funded militaries will be stretched to the breaking-point.  

In those desperate existential circumstances, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Israel will be motivated to turn to their ultimate recourse: the use of nuclear weapons. Since China, Russia and North Korea — and soon Iran — possess their own nuclear arsenals, the stage will be set for Armageddon. 

It is that nightmare scenario that understandably stirs Biden’s fears. And it is those fears, shared by all rational leaders in the West, that encourage the authoritarians to believe they can challenge the international order with impunity. They respect the West’s capabilities but doubt its will to use them — and by that test, the Biden administration’s performance has been mixed.   

Left with a flawed plan by Donald Trump to end what both called the “forever war” in Afghanistan, Biden made the situation worse with his precipitous and chaotic withdrawal.  

During Russia’s well-telegraphed runup to its invasion of Ukraine, his administration failed to prepare the United States and the West for a successful Ukraine resistance and defeat of the aggression. It planned instead for acceptance of a new status quo, just as the Obama-Biden administration did after Russia’s first Ukraine invasion in 2014. 

Once its weak deterrent message of economic sanctions predictably failed in 2022, Biden flinched at each decision point from providing Ukraine with the weapons and munitions it needed to reverse the aggression in a timely manner. Now, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is under intense pressure to accept what Biden advocated from the start: a stalemate as the only strategic course for his partially occupied country, with 20 percent in Russian hands.  That seems to be the best Ukraine will be allowed to hope for despite the Biden administration’s masterful rallying of NATO support for a very constrained objective. 

It means that, after his blitzkrieg invasion was stalled by the valor of Ukraine’s military, leadership and population, Putin’s fallback strategy of a protracted struggle wearing down Western will is meeting with more success.  

Biden’s paralyzing fear of escalation was also demonstrated in his response to almost 50 attacks on U.S. forces in the Mideast by Iran’s proxies in Syria. A belated pinprick strike on a Hezbollah base in Syria last week did not prevent additional attacks.  

Xi, the primary Asian partner in the Russia-China replay of the Hitler-Tojo assault on the Western order, has studied the American and allied response to Putin’s initial move. He has surely concluded that during a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Washington will be inhibited by fear of escalation and by strict adherence to the just war doctrine of proportionality. 

In the event of a seizure of one or more Taiwanese islands, or imposition of a partial or total blockade of Taiwan, Biden and his national security team can be expected to oppose any retaliatory strikes on the source of aggression: military bases and ports in China. If Washington again accepts full responsibility to avoid escalation, Beijing will be free to work its will. Taiwan and America’s credibility will pay the price. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Additionally, he was responsible for preparing the seminal Battle of Ideas brief in the office of the secretary of Defense in 2002. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.