War at the End of History

The Delusion of a Multipolar World

Vano SHLAMOV (AFP/File) NATO troops take part in a joint military exercise in Georgia in August 2018

Seeing as how one of our most fearless thought leaders has taken this moment of international instability to opine on how the United States is incapable of dealing with Russia, Iran, and China—I figured I would take a moment to properly contextualize what the current distribution of global power actually is.

Setting aside that there is no actual reason to think that Russia, China, and Iran share any actual durable interests besides a generalized opposition to liberal democracy—it is worth briefly looking at the actual threat these countries pose in the highly unlikely event of a globalized conflict.

But what does this actually mean in terms of being able to generate military hard power? While things like GDP and military spending aren’t a 1:1 representation of how an effective fighting force is made and it ignores a lot of the complexity of military industries, I’d like to point out a few statistics to demonstrate the insurmountable position that the United States and fellow liberal democracies actually hold in the international system. This is also not going to be a particularly exhaustive list of reasons of why I don’t think the world is falling apart.

Lumping together Russia, Iran, and China they would represent something like 23% of global GDP if you’re measuring by PPP. Sounds scary in a vacuum right? 23%? That’s almost a quarter of the world economy!

Yeah. The United States and our allies account for about 47% of the world economy. I included Ukraine since you know…they’re already at war with Russia. But I also didn’t include South American countries that are part of the Rio Treaty, Pakistan, or India who would more likely than not become involved in this conflict. Including them? The American alliance network would be well over 50% of global GDP.

To contextualize this, this is about the equivalent ratio of economic dominance that the Allies held over the Axis at the height of Axis power in 1941 of WWII—a level of economic power that historians generally recognize as making the outcome of this conflict a foregone conclusion.

Economic dominance of course translates over into the actual industrial power of a nation to produce materiel for a conflict. These nations—not coincidentally—also hold the preponderance of global military spending. For 2021 (I couldn’t find an easier graphic for 2022, and I’m too lazy to do all the math again) the United States and our allies make up over 60% of global defense spending.

This all translates over into warships, more planes, more munitions, and most importantly, more well-equipped men and women who would go and fight in any prospective conflict. As a smaller example of this, the United States alone has more military aircraft than China, Russia, and Iran combined. It goes without saying the current naval balance of power is no different. Before counting our allies.

The will to get up and out of a trench and kill the enemy is the core of what makes a good fighting force, but you’d much rather do that with economic weight behind you. A JDAM doesn’t really care about how high your morale is.

This brings me to another important point I want to make. The United States and our liberal democratic allies control almost every major global sea lane. The enduring friendships we’ve made and expanded since 1991 would mean that any prospective conflict will take place in a ring surrounding Russia, Iran, and China. It will be their nations under attack, and it will be their sources of materials being choked off from their industries. Their military factories will be under attack, while the coalition of liberal democracies will be comparatively safe from destruction.

The pace and tempo of the fighting will also be at the choosing of the United States and our coalition of allies. China is contained within the first island chain, Russia cannot take Avdiivka—let alone push into central Europe—and Iran has to contend with a series of hostile Gulf states that will not take kindly to their expansionism.

While the United States and our allies would be able to marshal our resources and gear our industries for a long war, our enemies cannot. The balance of global power and the network of liberal democracies that ring the globe simply do not lend themselves to this.

This is really my point here. The era after 1991 was such a success for the global expansion of liberal democracy that people seem to have forgotten the scale of what was actually accomplished. When we talk about the supposed unraveling of the liberal international order, we’re really talking about a few autocratic holdouts that are vastly overmatched when put in context. The security architecture that was built by the United States after the Cold War is the most dominant system of global relations that has ever existed—it just seems comparatively weak because we’ve gotten so used to it.

This is all of course ignoring that any conflict of this scale would almost certainly go nuclear at some level, and it also ignores that Russia is already a deeply exhausted force from their endlessly floundering military campaign in Ukraine. This is more just to say that when people make these tedious arguments about how whatever autocratic country of the week is overtaking the United States—don’t forget that we have quite a few friends.