Maintaining International Order
The most important use of new weapons may involve preventing states from threatening their neighbors. Even as the Cold War’s end reduced the threat of nuclear armageddon, it opened a Pandora’s box of new threats to the peace by regional rivalries. Western nations have failed to contain these efforts to rewrite the international order because of the incremental, low-level nature of the hostilities conducted by regional powers. New technologies might provide a means to carefully calibrate a forceful response, beyond mere diplomatic protest, that could counter efforts to upset the U.S.-led liberal international order.
Russia has probably become the number one revanchist power in the world. Seeking to restore its influence in its “near abroad,” Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014—the first change in European borders by force since 1945. It has engaged in a covert military intervention and provocations to foment unrest in the rest of Ukraine. It has intervened in the Syrian civil war with bombers, cruise missiles, and small ground units, and has sparked tensions with Turkey while cooperating with Iran. It has launched a military buildup (increasing military spending by 7.5 percent to $66.4 billion in 2015),47 despite its declining economy, and has adopted a muscular deployment of forces along its borders with E.U. states.
China’s stunning economic rise has sparked a parallel increase in its military and diplomatic place in the world.48 While China currently cannot challenge American superiority in the global commons of the air and sea, the trajectory of its economic and military growth foreshadows a day when it will be able to deny the U.S. access to the seas around East Asia and contest it for supremacy in the Pacific Ocean. China now boasts the second largest military budget in the world, at $215 billion per year, an increase of 132 percent in the last 10 years.49 It has embarked on a military buildup that extends beyond territorial defense to power projection abroad. China has given strong signs of what it will do with new ballistic missiles and a sophisticated navy in its seizure of disputed islands in the midst of the South China Sea, declaration of air defense zones over the Senkaku island chain off of Japan, and its threats against Taiwan. Communist China does not naturally seek peace; since taking power in 1950, its leadership has launched wars against many of its neighbors, seized control in Tibet, and fought the United States over Korea.
Although one is declining while the other is rising, both Russia and China seek to revise the American-sponsored balance of power in their regions. To be sure, the United States remains the world’s hegemonic power, one whose dominance in economic and military strength may be unprecedented in modern history. It deploys expeditionary forces from a network of bases around the world, it maintains a liberal trading and political system, and it keeps open the air and seas. Even though U.S. military expenditures fell during the Obama years, the $596 billion American defense budget dwarfs that of the other great powers and represents more than one-third of all global military spending.50 These figures understate American control of the global commons—air, sea, space, and now cyber—necessary for the projection of power worldwide, and its ability to leverage its economic and technological advances into military ones.51
Nonetheless, the United States must stretch its forces globally to maintain order, while Russia or China need only achieve regional superiority. Large mechanized armies bent on territorial conquest may have become less relevant. The war to reverse Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait may be the last such war we will see for some time. But that does not mean that regional powers will foreswear the use of force against the United States and its allies. Instead, they will exploit means of coercion that fall short of the level necessary to spark any serious conventional armed response. China, for example, has pressed its dubious maritime claims in the South China Sea by converting small shoals and rocks near the Philippines into bases.52 Russia pressures Ukraine by sending weapons, air and artillery support, and even irregular troops to prop up a supposed independence movement along its border.53 Both nations are conducting a low-intensity struggle with the United States in cyberspace, with China stealing the U.S. government personnel database in 2015 and Russia hacking into the electronic files of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign leaders in 2016. Even if nuclear weapons and American hegemony render direct conventional war less likely, nations will still pursue their interests by coercing other states.
Rogue states, as the Clinton and Bush administrations called them, or “states of concern” in the Obama years, compound these threats to international peace and stability. Whatever their name, these autocratic states both oppress their own populations and threaten their neighbors. North Korea, for example, remains one of the most extreme dictatorships on earth, with a population deprived of basic services and subject to famine and starvation, an oppressive police state, with one of the world’s smallest per capita GNP. At the same time, the Kim regime devotes the lion’s share of its budget to its armed forces. North Korea maintains the fifth largest army in the world and it periodically launches attacks on South Korea, such as the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship.
Iran has joined North Korea in challenging the regional status quo with a level of hostilities that fall short of outright war. Iran supports religious militias such as Hezbollah, which harasses Israel from southern Lebanon, and sends irregular troops to support the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. It supported Shiite militia groups during the Iraq war. Both Iran and North Korea bolster their revisionist agendas with programs to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which would allow them to pursue their unconventional attacks without fear of reprisal. Their programs could spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, where Saudi Arabia and Egypt might seek to match Iran, or in East Asia, where Japan and South Korea might develop nuclear deterrents. Rogue nations refuse to abide by the basic principles of the international system and may seek to export revolution or disrupt the existing order. Yet, their autocratic natures and revolutionary worldviews make them less susceptible to diplomatic or political pressure.
Some nations may bear ill will toward the United States, such as Venezuela, but have few military means to inflict harm. Only very limited American force could be justified to forestall a threat from Caracas. Other nations, however, such as North Korea, present themselves as rivals and are acquiring the means to attack. Pyongyang still considers itself at war with the U.S. and South Korea and holds the national goal of expelling American troops and forcibly unifying the peninsula under its regime. While the Kim regime has held the capacity to attack American troops stationed in South Korea since 1953, it posed no military threat to the continental United States. In 2016, however, North Korea successfully tested a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, and in 2012 it launched a satellite into low-Earth orbit—the technology necessary to develop a ballistic missile capable of striking North America.54 As the magnitude of the harm posed by Pyongyang has increased dramatically (nuclear weapons), and the likelihood it could execute an attack is rising sharply (ballistic missiles), the United States could legitimately employ more destructive means to squelch the threat of a North Korean attack. More precise weapons may give the United States the means to degrade or eliminate a North Korean nuclear threat without causing the wider harm that might trigger a broader war.
The pace of today’s most pressing international threats seems to be set by the disintegration of states and the rise of civil wars, the spread of terrorism, and the proliferation of WMD technology, as well as their negative spillover effects upon neighbors, or the international system as a whole. To be sure, the threat of conventional conflicts between states always exists, though the odds of a war between the great powers has receded since the end of World War II. While the chances of great power conflict have decreased, the capability to duplicate their destructiveness has expanded because of the spread of technology into less responsible hands. But technology may also present the means to curb these threats. New weapons technologies