Senator JD Vance on December 11 suggested that Ukraine surrender land in order to obtain a peace settlement with Russia.
"It ends the way nearly every single war has ever ended: when people negotiate and each side gives up something that it doesn't want to give up," the Ohio Republican said to reporters. "No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries."
Vance has apparently not heard of World War II, which did not end with a negotiation either in Europe or the Pacific. Moreover, given what he just said about a peace-for-land agreement with Russia, Vance also apparently knows nothing about the Munich Pact of 1938. I suspect he may not be able to locate the Sudetenland on a map.
Vance is not the only misguided American in Washington. Leaders, officials, and legislators across the political spectrum have gone crazy, thinking their crowd-pleasing but truly awful ideas, if implemented, will have no consequences.
We start with Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. The President thought nothing bad would follow from a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
The rushed move immediately resulted in the deaths of 13 American soldiers and the abandonment of $7.2 billion in military equipment. The disaster, however, did not end there. A series of catastrophes continue to this day.
Almost immediately after the exit, Russian President Vladimir Putin began planning the invasion of Ukraine, which he launched the following February after China signaled support for the assault. Twenty days before Russian forces crossed the Ukraine border, Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing and the pair issued a 5,300-word statement declaring their "no-limits" partnership. Since then, China has been all-in on supporting the Russian war effort.
Next, Russia and China, directly and through warlords, began to destabilize much of North Africa with insurgencies that look like wars. Both Moscow and Beijing are now fueling what could be the next big conflict there: Algeria moving to break apart American-friend Morocco, which guards the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.
Then Iran, through proxy Hamas, attacked Israel on October 7. China has been giving diplomatic cover to the atrocities of the terrorists, mobilized its massive propaganda apparatus to support them, and financed Iran with elevated purchases of oil. Since the initial attacks, Iran's two other principal proxies—the Houthi militia in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon — have joined the fight against the Jewish state. All three proxies use Chinese weapons.
Those who do want America to be involved in these conflicts minimize them as just "regional" wars. Is that correct?
"It is possible in the 20th and 21st centuries to say that there are, in fact, no regional wars, because all of them have some degree of involvement by the great powers," said Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, to Gatestone this month. "Not one significant conflict anywhere in the world is without either the initiation by, or involvement of, some extra-regional players."
With China and Russia fully supporting disruptive elements, it is no wonder that the world has passed from a period of general calm to one of constant turbulence. "The past two years have seen the most conflicts of any time since the end of the Second World War," writes Paul Poast in a November Atlantic piece titled "Not a World War But a World at War."
We all hope Poast, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, is correct when he tells us that there is no global war, but in the 1930s separate conflicts merged into what we now call World War II. It is possible the same dynamic will occur this time.
The merger of conflicts at this moment is high because Moscow, and especially Beijing, are taking advantage of current disputes. "China is now backing aggressors on three continents," Jonathan Bass of energy consultant InfraGlobal Partners tells Gatestone.
In other words, the Chinese regime is fighting proxy wars. "Israeli officials, privately voicing their own opinions and not government policy, say Hamas's war on their country is part of China's assault on America," Bass, who is now based in the Persian Gulf, says.
"Proxy wars can, if left unattended, become direct wars between major powers," Copley, also editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, says. "World War I began with a regional conflict between Serbian independence movements, backed by Moscow, which killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown. World War II began when Hitler kept escalating small regional disputes until major powers had to respond."
Almost no one in an official position in America views today's conflicts as part of or prelude to a major war. Biden has completely ignored the troubles in North Africa and is trying to manage the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He is far more interested in avoiding escalation than in winning, and not angering the totalitarians in Beijing and Tehran has apparently become his primary goal.
That is a grave strategic mistake. Take Putin's war of the moment. He has said many times that Ukraine has no right to exist. That is a clue as to the advisability of a peace deal that leaves the Russian strongman in control of any Ukrainian territory. He was not satisfied with annexing just Crimea in 2014, and he will not be satisfied with any agreement that does not extinguish Ukraine.
Furthermore, he is unlikely to stop with just that embattled state. By explicitly adopting the language of Peter the Great, Putin has made it clear that Russia has the right to expand to areas now in NATO states. The Baltics, for instance, are obviously at risk. So is much of Eastern Europe.
Many in the West say that Putin would not dare to attack a NATO country, yet a failure of the West to defend Ukraine, a country protected by the guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, could convince Putin that he does not have to worry about the trans-Atlantic alliance or its most important member, the United States of America.
Vladimir Putin's project is to restore the Russian Empire and rule, among others, all Slavs on the Eurasian landmass. With China's backing and little opposition from America, anything can happen, especially if Beijing should then start moving against its neighbors or closing off nearby seas and skies.
"Big powers sense opportunities when small nations are in conflict," says Copley, "and what seems an easy case of 'conflict exploitation' soon becomes an out-of-control firefight."
The next "firefight" looks as if it will involve most of the world.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
Brian Ernest James Bridgman