In his brilliant book tracing the origins of the First World War, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,” Christopher Clark says, “The protagonists were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”

As the prestigious Munich Security Conference wrapped up over President’s Day weekend, the pervading feeling of many longtime observers is that we are again sleepwalking toward a conflict nobody wants or needs -- this time with nuclear weapons.

Spurred by tactical disagreements, great and medium-sized powers are increasingly at odds. The Eastern Mediterranean is full of US, Russian, Turkish, Israeli, Iranian, Syrian and NATO-member maritime patrols. In the South China Sea, the US and China square off as China builds artificial islands and claims the vast body of water as a territorial sea -- akin to the US claiming the entire Gulf of Mexico. Russia blithely interferes in the US presidential election, and the West continues with strong sanctions on Moscow.

China’s One Belt One Road initiative increasingly becomes a reality. Beijing’s defense budget is rising rapidly, its shipyards are building new aircraft carriers, and it is emphasizing “sharp power,” a blend of hard and soft power that focuses on geo-economics and the newly emergent term “geo-tech.” Both are forms of 21st-century power that challenge the US and its Western allies globally, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.

Russia in many ways is a failing empire. Its demographics are declining, exacerbated by high levels of alcoholism and drug addiction; the economy has yet to truly diversify beyond oil and natural gas; the population is poorly distributed and its leader has a nearly pathological hatred for the US and NATO. And the Russians are perfecting a lethal combination of information warfare, electoral interference, special operations, cyber-warfare and propaganda even as they chafe bitterly under Western sanctions.

The European Union staggers along, as Germany struggles to find a path for effective governance. An ambitious but utterly inexperienced president leads France, while the UK is departing the EU even as the rest of the Euro bloc finally begins to rebound from the 2009 recession. There are calls for an independent EU military structure, dubbed Pesco, which might create duplication and competition with NATO. Disagreements abound, and the western Europeans are at odds about everything from the future of their union to the best way to deal with immigration.

Worst of all, there are increasing calls to “normalize” the way in which we view nuclear weapons. Russia continues to play the nuclear card, with Vladimir Putin seldom missing an opportunity to remind the West that he has tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at his disposal. Russian doctrine increasingly sees so-called low-yield weapons, warheads that can be “dialed down” to destructive power less than that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as equalizers for their badly outnumbered and out-trained conventional forces.

All of this gives any observer a feeling that we are building a case for a great-power war. What can we do to avoid drifting toward a potentially devastating global conflict?

Listen better. In Munich, we heard Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko describe the war in southeast Ukraine in diametrically opposed ways. Poroshenko brandished a battered EU flag like a cape, begging Europe “to keep the door open” for his nation. Lavrov smoothly blamed it all on NATO. Neither heard a word the other said. Repairing this disconnect can occur not only through formal diplomatic channels, but through so-called “track 2” diplomacy via academic institutions, think tanks, conferences, sports diplomacy and other, softer means.

Focus on arms control. All nations have a vested interest in arms control, which reduces cost, builds confidence and increases transparency. While several major efforts are stalled, we can begin with relatively “small ball” discussions on such things as maritime patrols and interactions at sea; procedures to reduce the possibility of collisions between military jets; demilitarizing the Arctic; and managing space-based offensive systems.

Strengthen nuclear counterproliferation. As Secretary of Defense James Mattis has said, there is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. The nuclear powers must band together to avoid allowing more nations to join the nuclear club. This will require a combination of intelligence-sharing; interdiction of radioactive material; embargoing nuclear knowledge and scientist travel; and UN sanctions. In the end, we can probably defuse any conventional confrontation.

Be ready. If all our efforts to create the best strategy, focus on containing the nuclear options, and diplomacy fail, we must be ready to fight. Mattis gets that, and the Department of Defense under his leadership will be ready to “fight tonight.” That capability is an important part of deterrence, of course.

All of this must be done while we avoid a war on the Korean Peninsula, where -- fortunately -- our interests align better with China’s. As we emerge from the cocoon of the Olympics, the tensions will return in Korea. We have been in the stage where it will “get better before it gets worse again.” One hopes we can work positively with China and perhaps build on that going forward as we face larger, more complex disagreements on trade, cyberpower and East Asia.

Clark, in “Sleepwalkers,” sees what is coming our way quite clearly, saying, “Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has made way for a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers -- a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.”

The chairman of the Munich Security Conference, German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, summed it up by saying simply, “The world has moved closer -- much too close -- to the brink of major interstate war.” It is like 1914 again -- except we have nuclear weapons. We need strong leaders who see that we still have a chance to wake up from this dream.


James Stavridis
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg columnist. -- Ed.

(Bloomberg)