There’s an old caution in geopolitics: Never get into a war on the Eurasian landmass.

Yet today, four conflicts on the Asian periphery threaten to burn into one. The first smolders in the northeast, on the Korean peninsula. The second is nearer the southeastern edge of Asia, in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. These are cold war, gray zone conflicts in which the threshold of a hot war hasn’t yet been reached. Yet war can be waged by means other than through armed conflict.  Have we reached this stage of hybrid war off the coasts of East Asia?

On the western side of things, a very hot war rages in Ukraine. The fourth – and most recent – inferno burns the very southwest edge of the continent in Gaza and in the Levant more generally.

What all four regional conflicts have in common is unfinished business. In the case of Korea, the Korean War was never officially resolved. There was only an armistice declared after the Eurasian powers, dressed in the cloak of communism, fought the Western powers, under the guise of the UN, to a standstill. It’s not generally known that U.S. and Chinese troops faced off during the Korean War, with the Chinese armed forces being supported by Soviet air cover. The Korean Armistice Agreement ended formal hostilities. The DMZ was established, and decades of cold, yet simmering conflict, have ensued.

The case of Taiwan had similar underpinnings. The uncompleted business there involved, of course, the failure of the Chinese communists to completely fulfill Mao’s revolution. Chiang Kai-shek and his army escaped to the island known in the West as Formosa, the ‘beautiful island.’ As long as Taiwan remains free with a popularly-elected government, it symbolizes what the Chinese Communist Party cannot ultimately allow: self-determination. As on the Korean peninsula, Taiwan symbolizes an incomplete revolution which results in a frozen conflict yet to be fully resolved between East and West, between patently communist autocracies and capitalist republics.

Near the western margins of the Asian landmass, the etiologies of the conflicts which threaten to burn together from a cloth set afire at separate corners seems, at least on the fabric’s surface, different. Yet underneath, we see uncompleted conflict as the cause. In Ukraine, the remnants of the Cold War, a revanchist Russia and its neocolonial aspirations butted up against unrestrained NATO expansion begun a generation earlier, after the Soviet Union imploded.

In Israel, the unresolved consequence of the 1948 War of Independence in which the State of Israel was born, in the context of an incomplete withdrawal of Western European colonial forces – mostly English and French – from the Mandate of Palestine, and from what are now parts of Isarel, Jordan and the occupied territories. Positioned somewhat behind these conflicts and sandwiched somewhere in the middle in chronological terms, the unfinished business of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, and the incomplete Arab Spring also loom prominently, yet in the background.

How is Iran involved? On a cultural level, it must be asked whether America ever fully ‘forgave’ the Iranians for kicking out our proxied Shah. In terms of current events, the current Israeli government, as constituted, has repeatedly vowed not to tolerate a nuclear Iran. Despite its Shia roots, on a historical level, many in Tehran continue to regard their nation as the heir to a Persian empire with its satrapies in Syria, in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, in Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, and in Gaza. Layered atop this messy cake is the Shia-Sunni split in the region, which has yet to be resolve as Islam exits its medieval period akin to when Christianity had to heal its Reformational divide and attendant sectarian wars. And Israel has yet to solve the dilemma of what to do with an Arab population within the areas that it controls which can neither vote nor be allowed to display their own flag. Mark one

Besides unfinished business, what all these have in common, of course, is the military involvement of the West, as led by America, the once indispensable nation. World wars (witness I and II) represented the dismantlement of colonialism and the shrinkage of European hegemony. III is symptomatic of the death of the West and its postwar order more broadly.  The U.S. has forces in South Korea, in Japan, in the Philippines, and is desperately attempting to arm a desperate Taiwan. It’s the US Navy conducting freedom of navigation exercises through the Straits of Taiwan and the South China Sea. We have two carrier groups in the Middle East, along with an amphibious assault ship and all the attendant surface combatants. There are American troops based in Syria and Iraq. Why, no one knows.

And, of course, it’s us bankrupting ourselves and depleting our own strategic stockpiles by arming the Ukrainians with increasingly dangerous weapons in a war of attrition. On the other side, the Russians, after another disastrous start reminiscent of Stalin’s failures at the outset of the Nazi invasion of his country, will eventually prevail. They know how to conduct this type of war. Despite the Western media’s cheerleading of a Ukrainian victory, the tide is eventually turning in favor of a much larger Russian population with more resources and a greater industrial capacity. 

We are broke, as are our European and Japanese allies. We cannot possibly manage the direct defense commitments we have, much less supply the Ukrainians and the Australians and the Taiwanese with all the weapons we’ve promised, because, let’s face it, we don’t know how to make anything anymore. We’ve either forgotten how, or we just don’t have the industrial scale we once possessed. By some estimates, the Chinese have 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. They have more people after the decimal point than we have in our entire nation. The only thing we can still make in great enough quantity is money (the printed kind), and as some economic historians point out, the day is approaching when no one will want to buy our final export – our debt – anymore.

These four conflicts will eventually burn together into one, seamless conflagration. When it’s all over, the economic, military and political heft will have moved west along with the setting sun, to nations such as a reunited Korea, a resurgent if battered China, and a powerful India, which will have managed to keep itself out of the fray, to the chagrin of its former colonial masters, now vassals of the East. India was always the impetus behind the Nonaligned Movement. Why should it stick its neck out for America, much less England and the rest?

In the cinders, a new league of nations will have assumed the place of the former one, this one workable, with teeth. The world will look decidedly undemocratic, powered by AI surveillance and autonomous weaponry. A Sino-Indian rivalry will parallel the old Ango-French competition of the colonial era to determine who will dominate the new order. America, defeated, will turn inward and wage a generations-long internecine conflict, whose flames will be kept moldering by the Chinese hyperpower. 

We can either lurch toward this fate. Or we can look for ways to stop it now. Withdraw from the Midde East. Press for a negotiated settlement on Ukraine (to the extent we have the leverage), seek reproachment with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea, and just wait for the Kim Jong Un god to die and his hollowed-out regime to implode.

The Palestinians need a state. Iran should be invited into a true dialogue. We have to stop using soldiers and sanctions as hammers where everything and everyone looks like a nail. As for ourselves? We need to heal our racial/class/economic divides and cease bullying our friends as well as our enemies. Maybe then, we can squeak by. Maybe then, we’ll avert WW III. What have we got to lose?

© 2023 by Michael C. Just