Polemics
Disputes and Debates on the Topical Issues of International Security
The Shadow of the Third World War? Transformation Processes in the International Arena and Their Key Participants
August 6, 2024
On June 27, 2024, the 123rd Extended Session of the Trialogue Club International took place as part of the XXIII PIR Center International School on Global Security. The Session included two panel discussions, with the first devoted to the ongoing transformation processes, shifting world order, and emerging challenges.
Panelists:
- General Evgeny Buzhinskiy, Co-Chair, Trialogue Club International; Chairman of Executive Board, PIR Center;
- Dr. Dmitry Evstafiev, Professor of the Department of Theory of Law and State, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia;
- Dr. Dmitry Trenin, Research Professor, Academic Supervisor for World Military Economy and Strategy, Higher School of Economics; Member of Executive Board, PIR Center.
General Evgeny Buzhinskiy: We have quite an exciting topic: the shadow of World War III. I would say that, strange as it may sound, in 2024, we are balancing on the brink of a world war. That’s, of course, partly because of Ukraine. It’s evident that our former partners in Washington repeatedly take the decisions to climb to the next step of the so-called ladder of escalation, providing Ukraine with more and more lethal weapons, instigating them, or, actually, instigating themselves to deliver missile strikes deep in the Russian territory. The latest missile attack against a peaceful beach in Sevastopol left 153 people dead and wounded, including children, the youngest – two years old. It was an example of that climbing to the next step of escalation.
Of course, an adequate answer from the Russian side will follow, but that will not bring us to a world war. What may bring us to a world war is the very high possibility of direct confrontation between the Russian Federation and the so-called Collective West, NATO, or, which is much more dangerous, the United States directly.
It was, as I see it, a possible termination by the Russian side of the reconnaissance flights: US, French, and UK drone reconnaissance aircraft, which actually guided the missiles against Crimea or possible strikes against airbases in the neighboring countries where the F-16 will be deployed. I am unsure about that because it is impossible to deploy them in the Ukrainian territory, irrespective of the tricky plans. They could be deployed in Poland, land for five minutes at a Ukrainian airfield, and then take off to be used against Russian forces.
Dr. Dmitry Trenin: As the good soldier I once was, I will try to respond literally to the subject of this discussion. Let’s start with the issue of shadow. Shadow is usually a reflection of something already existing, which has some consequences for others. So, it might be World War III, as you named it, but it’s not something that already exists. Instead, it’s something in the air. World War III is a notion that is very well used. It has been used almost since the start of the nuclear age. It has been used for decades and decades.
So, a shadow of World War III… I think we might want to recall the Cold War. We could say that it was, in fact, World War III. So, if we are now looking for a label to pin on this matter, it could be World War IV, which includes elements of all the previous wars.
Today, something we see in Ukraine is essentially reminiscent of World War I. I think that the proper way to look at what is happening not only in Ukraine but globally is to call it a world crisis. This world crisis is simultaneously played on three stages around the world. One – Europe, another one is the Middle East, and the third one is Asia. All three battlefields or theaters are very much connected.
So, the question still remains unanswered. Will we be able to avoid the storm? As for the escalation issue, which General Buzhinsky referred to, it is undeterred. The people who are raising the stakes are seemingly undeterred by the possible consequences of raising the stakes against nuclear power in a region of vital national security interests for this power. That phenomenon confounds me.
It is unnatural compared to the Cold War. We only had one such incident in the entire history of the Cold War. It was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Nikita Khrushchev deployed Soviet nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba. For the President of the US and the whole US establishment, that was an intolerable challenge to American security. Lay people and the national security community in the United States threatened a nuclear war against the Soviet Union for placing nuclear missiles on the ground of Cuba about a thousand miles from the beaches of Florida.
Now, the beaches of Crimea are being bombed, and parts of the Russian strategic nuclear complex and early warning stations are being attacked. There was an incident with a drone. Why I recall this is because of some sort of similarity.
<…> This can only be understood as the belief in the West that Russia will never under any circumstance use nuclear weapons. I think it’s a huge gamble. For me, this is a source of trouble. On the Russian side, at this point, people, I believe, are concluding, in my discussions, that nothing will stop the West. Until Russia either demonstrates its determination to use nuclear weapons by means of nuclear explosions somewhere or has it televised around the world. So, the nukes are a retaliatory measure and should not be ruled out.
And there is the determination to use them. Or maybe there is a strike, not necessarily nuclear, but against a Western facility. I am just describing some conversations we are having in Moscow regarding the present situation.
Otherwise, if deterrence doesn’t work, you can do anything to a nuclear power, and it will not respond. If you fear nuclear weapons, you can be deterred. If you don’t have fear, then deterrence will not work.
For the Russian side, there is a lot of self-restraint at this point, which, for many people, is a sound policy. Because if you allow your adversary to advance across red lines, then the time will come when your warnings may fail. Your adversary will miss the point when he should have stopped. And he will go all the way. And the recent comment by Vladimir Putin, when he said that we are ready to go all the way… I think I understand what he means. But I am not sure his words are heard. Maybe dismissed as so many other warnings by Russia have been denied. So, it’s an image of crying “Wolf!”. You cry “Wolf!” and “Wolf!” and “Wolf!”… But nothing happens when the wolf comes. And that’s the end of it.
Apart from the words that Vladimir Putin used, there are some other things that he is doing. He ordered a nuclear exercise. Again, people have noticed it, and I don’t think it’s much of a deterrent. Putin’s order to train the use of nuclear weapons is still not exactly clear in terms of what he wants to say.
Rather than saying that we will use nuclear weapons when the existence of the Russian Federation is at stake, you say that we will lower the margin to a point when national security interests are at stake. And they are at stake even now.
So, that’s where we are. Many people today are devising various scenarios of retaliation and where retaliation could be performed. As General Buzhinsky mentioned, we are getting closer and closer to a dangerous point.
Yet, I do not suggest that we are already there. That’s why I said that shadow is probably the wrong analogy for the things to come. It’s not so much like in the days of the Cold War. Maybe we will manage to prevent a new war with a nuclear shot. I don’t know. I don’t think that this shot will be fired first in a nuclear format. I just don’t see any other way to stop the slide into the abyss. This is where we are sliding, and I think to stop it, we need to make a shot. One shot will be the last chance for all of us to come back to our senses and stop the slide that will finish us all.
I have no time to talk about the Middle East and China; I will just skip to the last portion of the topic – to transformation if we are lucky and if we manage to escape self-annihilation, then I think the world is likely to continue its transformation from the hegemony of essentially one power, one set of rules and values and institutions and so on. The world will diversify. People will have to agree on something not based on the hegemonic position of one power, whoever it could be. A new world order is being born even today. I think that the West is perhaps doing its utmost to prevent that new world order. It’s certainly much more than Russia is doing. I am talking about the sanctions, I am talking about various other restrictions, and that today is bringing us to a new global picture in which there will be diverse players and diverse value systems, and we will have to negotiate and come to some sort of shared understanding to proceed.
General Evgeny Buzhinskiy: It puzzles me that people tend to compare the current situation with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. You see, at that time, of course, the USSR was definitely inferior to the United States because of its nuclear arsenal. Of course, the USSR, with its missiles in Cuba, could inflict some damage on the territory of the United States. In some cities, maybe. But could not annihilate the whole country. And still, President Kennedy did not play risky games and preferred to strike a compromise deal with Nikita Khrushchev, and he was right.
Now, you see, the Russian nuclear arsenal is at least adequate to that of the US, if not superior. And yet, some people think that they can play risky games with Russia and say that they may start a nuclear war with Russia. That’s my personal assessment of the situation.
Dr. Dmitry Evstafiev: The question is, who can save the world from a major war? Why I believe it’s a minor footnote: we all understand that a major war will soon be a nuclear war. And that will be a very short period when a major conventional war turns into a major nuclear war. But who can save the world from the war? The answer is straightforward: those who can listen. And that’s the problem. Because politicians can hear, all those who belong to society’s political culture can listen and calculate the risk.
What we in Russia see is that the people who are in power in the West are deaf. And the answer for me is straightforward: you don’t have politicians in the West. You have political actors. In Europe, the United States of America, and the rest of the Western world that is not in the West now… But you have political actors. The term actor is very representative. You play your people in orbits, and your people in government play different games. But they are not politicians. In the US, there is only one politician named Barack Obama. All the others are actors playing games. Blinken is a musician. By the way, I wonder how many people in the audience remember the guy called Howard Hollis, or, as he preferred, calling himself Bo Callaway. Who of you remember the mighty Bob Al-Anon? No one. He was the Secretary of the Army under Richard Nixon. He was the architect of the Watergate affair. He spent 18 months in prison for a conspiracy plot. If you look at Jake Sullivan, they are just alike. In their behavior, in their appearance, in their acts. They are all actors. They cannot make political decisions; they cannot make political calculations.
And before we in Russia see politicians in the West, there will be a slide to a significant war. Then, if we have any, I would like to put forward five questions for a discussion.
Q1. Are we entering the era of full-scale wars? Not exactly. Just 20 years ago, we had a mid-intensity conflict, the second war in Iraq. That’s a classical mid-scale conventional war described in the US military doctrines.
But we don’t have the resources for a significant war of the scale of World War I or World War II. We don’t have the armies; we don’t have the mobilization potential for that. Neither Russia nor the West. There are two countries that can wage a large-scale war. The first is China; the second is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That’s all. That’s your choice for a major war. All other wars will be either mid-scale conventional conflicts or nuclear wars. The choice is very limited.
Then, what is essential is that in the period of late globalization, which we in Russia call the period of complete American dominance and military and political superiority, there was a dominating idea that the United States would control the chain of low-intensity conflicts and could be contained by the US at the level of hybrid war s, proxy wars, etc. The fact is, however, that the US cannot control and contain this chain of low-intensity conflicts, that low-intensity conflicts will inevitably grow into mid-intensity conflicts and then into a war. That is the fundamental understanding, and the sooner the West understands that it cannot control low-intensity disputes as it was able to control them five-seven years ago, the situation will improve.
Q2. Are we in the process of entering a situation with a high probability of a major war? We are already in the stage of transition from a major war situation to mid-intensity conflicts on a continental scale. From all the technical sides, even by American criteria, the conflict in Ukraine, with additional escalating steps by the Collective West, is a mid-intensity conflict. That’s why we are now on the brink of a major war.
But we have a second conflict that could grow to the same stage in days, weeks, or probably hours. We don’t know. That’s the conflict in the Middle East. If you don’t want to address the conflict in Ukraine, because it is not very comfortable for the Western audience to analyze its own behavior, the West doesn’t like looking into the mirror, we all know that, but look at the Middle East. Just half of the year. And the situation turned from an attempted anti-terrorist operation against not even a political party; it was an extremist organization <…> The situation turned into the reality of a major war in the Middle East. The war started in early October. Now, we are freely discussing the possibility of a nuclear conflict in the Middle East that could begin with a strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear installations. That’s a very short period of escalation.
Once again, in all that period, technically, the state of Israel was fighting against the socio-political organizations and institutions. No single state was involved in the fight against Israel.
Q3. Do we enter a new nuclear era? Not exactly. It is not exactly yet a new nuclear era. <…> For the past twenty years, we have lived with the understanding that nuclear weapons do not play any role in military equilibrium and definitely no role at all in political equilibrium. Now, they have returned. We can argue whether that was good or bad. The fact is that nuclear weapons are again a part of military and political equilibrium.
But I disagree that we should start nuclear tests. A year ago, we could have stopped participating in the CTBT. Now, we should find the place that could be the subject of a strike. That cannot be done through dialogue. We should choose someone against whom we make a strike to show the world how bad it is to have a nuclear escalation and then shake hands.
We have quite several options to choose from. But if we look again, technically, at the situation, what places and situations could be the first cases of nuclear war? I’d say just three.
- Korean peninsula. That story of the nuclear option has existed for 30+ years. That’s an old case.
- Israeli nuclear strike against Iran – same. For 30 years, we have been discussing the possibility of a nuclear strike from Tel Aviv against Iran.
- Russia’s strike against NATO forces is not new, either. It’s been in our doctrine for quite a time. It’s not Putin’s concept. The possibility of a nuclear strike against NATO forces in case of aggression existed already in Yeltsin’s military doctrine.
Nothing new at all. We need just to adopt this psychology. The ball is on the Western side.
Q4. Does rhetoric matter? Yes, but not so much as it did 30 years ago. But that’s a problem. What we see in Russia is the complete aggravation of political communication in the West. We should do something about that.
Political communication should be returned at least to the level of the 1980s.
Q5. Is there a way out? And is there a space for the new world order? Hardly. The problem is that political immunity against big wars is gone everywhere, including in Russia and the West.
Then, the question is with the battlefield that used to be called Ukraine. It was selected among others. It was chosen as an extra country, as an unnecessary country in the European geopolitical space. It was a wrong choice of the West. Russia has always been against having Ukraine as a battlefield. We made all possible, even at the stake of the interests of the Russian-language population and Russian security interests. We all remember the story of Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 because we understood that Ukraine is a false battlefield, a wrong choice.
Do you know why? It’s all about history. About the history of Ukraine. There is too much noise about Ukraine, too much blood, too much atrocities. No world order could be born. Pro-American, pro-European, pro-Russian, pro-Chinese… Don’t forget that the Chinese are major players in the Ukrainian battlefield.
No world order could erupt from the Ukrainian conflict. The West presumed that history doesn’t matter. Even then, we in Russia knew that it mattered. And this history starts to play against the West now. I’d like to end with a final short observation. The Third World War will not, from my point of view, start in Ukraine. It will begin in the Middle East. And it will end in Ukraine. Thank you.
Q&A Session
Mr. Hubert Knirsch, Head of the Political Department, Embassy of Germany: We heard some differences between you, but also some unanimity. I would just like you to speak more clearly to us: are you saying that Russia today is ready to use its nuclear in support of its offense?
General Evgeny Buzhinskiy: Let me start. Of course not. You see, President Putin in Saint Petersburg said clearly that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons as a last resort according to our doctrine. No less, no more. Of course, when I speak about the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons, I mean that… not that I am afraid, but I don’t want a direct confrontation between Russian forces and American forces. I am confident that any direct armed confrontation between Russian and American forces will lead inevitably to a global conflict. My strong belief is that a nuclear conflict of any dimension cannot be controlled. Escalation is imminent. And it will inevitably lead to a global exchange of nuclear strategic weapons between the US and Russia.
That was my assessment of any scenario, any conflict of this type. It’s an illusion… I know that some American generals and politicians say that a limited war is possible somewhere in a distant theatre: in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia-Pacific. That it would involve a limited use of tactical nuclear weapons and that it could be controlled. That it would be a controlled escalation. I don’t believe it, though. It’s an illusion. In a direct US-Russia confrontation, neither side can afford to lose. So, an escalation would be a natural result.
Dr. Dmitry Evstafiev: First of all, I would like to note that none of us on this panel represents the Russian state and does not hold any state positions at this point. What we say are our personal views, unlike in the West. What should be understood? I would like to return to the beginning of my presentation. The new understanding, the new world order, and the new concept of de-escalation could be built only by people who can listen to each other. A new world order cannot be built by the deaf.
Dr. Dmitry Trenin: We are talking about deterrence. Deterrence means that you have the means and the resources to stop your adversary from doing something dangerous. Otherwise, why would countries have weapons? They actually have weapons in order to prevent things that would be detrimental to their security.
We are not in a war against Ukraine. We are in a war against the Collective West. It’s a proxy war. Ukraine is the theatre of war. The goal of the United States, as described by the Secretary of Defense, is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. A strategic defeat is an existential threat, so it’s the Russian leadership’s highest national security issue.
Key words: International Security
RUF
F4/SOR – 24/08/06
