The Next World War – Will Cyber Or Finance Dominate?
This photograph taken on October 16, 2019 shows US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets multirole fighters and … [+]
With 100,000 Russian troops massing on the borders of Ukraine and enjoying a buildup of supporting airpower and logistics, I was happy to receive Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackermann’s cheerily entitled book ‘2034 – a Novel of the Next World War’ through the letterbox.
The book outlines how a potential naval focused war between China and the US might play out. It is a fun read though also an unvarnished appeal for the USA to spend more on cyber capabilities, and at times ascribes a tactical naivety to the US navy that is implausible.
New World Order
While there is a cottage industry of writers opining on the ‘next’ war in the South China Sea, Stavridis is well qualified as a warrior and scholar. From my own non-military perch, the book emphasized at least four things about the ‘new world order’ that Xi Jinping references at last week’s Boao Forum.
The first of these is that clusters of books that warn against coming wars, may eventually be worth paying attention to. The outstanding example here is Erskine Childers’ ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ which intricately unveiled the contours of how Britain was vulnerable to a surprise attack by the German navy (a trajectory later enacted by Maldwin Drummond in Rune VII).
Riddle of the Sands
A related thought is that history repeats itself, which is why the argument of Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ is a seductive one. In addition, reading Margaret McMillan’s ‘1914’ I was struck by the inexorable buildup of navies (principally Germany and Britain) in the early part of the 20th century (that Norman Angell also flagged in ‘The Great Illusion’) and the parallels between this phase of history and the growth of the Chinese navy, which on number of ships alone is bigger than the American one.
The third…
