China and North Korea just canceled decades of US military planning

In November, two decisive moments changed the global geopolitical landscape. For the first time, North Korean troops appeared on the battlefield of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Shortly afterwards, the Danish military arrested a Chinese-flagged bulk carrier, the Yi Peng 3, on suspicion of deliberately cutting two data cables at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The two incidents mark a fundamental change in the strategic environment. For the first time, America's adversaries are prepared to provide direct military assistance to each other, even on the other side of the world.

Whether you call it an axis of aggressors, an unholy alliance, a new axis of evil or something else, the fact remains that the military ties between China, Russia, Iran and Korea of the North are deepening. And this shift is expected to upend how the United States and its allies around the world think about and ensure their national security.

The deployment of North Korean troops and the Chinese aircraft carrier suspected of cutting the cables did not come out of nowhere. For years, millions of North Korean shells and thousands of Iranian drones have appeared on the battlefield in Ukraine, while Chinese economic aid has also supported Russia's war effort. China and Russia announced their boundless friendship in February 2022, just days before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.

More recently, Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defense pact committing them to help each other in the war, while Russia and Iran are working on a comprehensive treaty which, according to the Russian foreign minister, will include a defense component. But pacts and promises are one thing; Direct involvement in two ongoing wars in Europe – a hot war and a hybrid war is another. China and North Korea have now crossed this Rubicon.

To better understand why these events change everything for the United States, we must delve into the rather shaky world of American defense strategy and force planning.

Upon entering World War II, the United States sized its military to be able to fight two wars at once: one in the Pacific against Imperial Japan and one in Europe against Nazi Germany. This view of force planning continued more or less through much of the Cold War, when the United States was worried about fending off communism around the world.

After the Cold War, the U.S. military maintained a two-war force structure, apparently to guard against the possibility of simultaneous wars against Iraq and North Korea, at least on paper. Whether the United States could have fought two full-scale wars in practice remains an open question.

The initial fights were never the main challenge; the United States has sufficient forces to do so on two fronts. Sustaining forces in protracted wars is what has proven so difficult. The burden of supporting two simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strained U.S. ground forces, despite the fact that these were relatively limited counterinsurgency wars, rather than the more intense style of conventional conflict that we let's observe again in Ukraine.

But as Chinese military power grew more formidable and the United States worked to reduce the military modernization deficit stemming from the so-called global war on terror, a two-war force structure was becoming more and more untenable. Defense planners recognized that the U.S. military would have difficulty fighting even one war against a great power, much less two simultaneously.

Washington has therefore lowered the bar. The Obama administration's 2011 Defense Strategic Guidance, a policy document that serves as the basis for overall military planning, called for defeating the aggression of any potential adversary while imposing unacceptable costs on another, dubbed the Defense Strategy. 'a war and a half. The Trump and then Biden administrations went further and got rid of half: the 2018 and 2022 defense strategies directed the U.S. military to plan to fight and win a war in one theater at a time, all by dissuading other adversaries without great difficulty. struggle. The plan is to keep the conflict isolated and localized.

This, in turn, brings us back to why North Korea's military deployment and China's cable cutting are so important. First, both acts indicate that conflict with an adversary in one part of the world will not necessarily be limited to that adversary and region. And second, these events highlight the United States' limited ability, or lack thereof, to deter one adversary from joining the fight with another on the other side of the globe.

Simply put, as the United States' adversaries move closer together, the chances that a conflict in one region will then spill over to another region increase significantly. This means that the fundamental planning assumptions of the most recent national defense strategies are outdated, if not downright wrong.

Previous administrations have attempted to counter this increasingly precarious strategic environment by attempting to break up this conglomeration of malicious actors. Both the Obama and Biden administrations have offered overtures to Iran. The first Trump administration attempted rapprochement with North Korea. And the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have all attempted various resets and overtures toward Russia.

Not surprisingly, all of these endeavors have failed for the simple reason that each of these adversaries is, in its own way, unhappy with the status quo and has interests that fundamentally conflict with those of the United States.

Even if the Trump administration succeeds in ending the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the emerging axis between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea will endure, for the simple reason that it remains in the strategic interest of the four States to preserve it. he.

For China, this axis translates into new sources of raw materials, military technology and potentially a future tool of geopolitical distraction for the United States. For Russia, the axis provides an economic lifeline (in the form of China) and military hardware (from North Korea and Iran). Iran and North Korea, in turn, stand to benefit from military technology and support from great powers.

None of these reasons will go away, even if the Trump administration negotiates some sort of truce.

The other way that administrations have attempted to address the mismatch between military threats and resources is to exclude certain parts of the world. Most notably, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all wanted to reduce U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. But each administration found itself hunkered down in the region significantly enough to stop the Islamic State; pushing back Iranian proxies; or, more recently, defending Israel and ending a broader regional war.

This is what some might call a revealed preference: while successive administrations may pay lip service to the idea that the Middle East is peripheral to America's core strategic interests, Washington has repeatedly demonstrated that it cares enough of this region to risk blood and treasure there.

The same is perhaps even more true for Europe, with which the United States is fundamentally linked. Even leaving aside cultural and historical ties, trade between the United States and the European Union represents almost 30% of all global trade in goods and services and 43% of global GDP.

So, despite the desire of some in Washington to move away from European security and focus directly on the Indo-Pacific, the United States will find that it is much easier to say this in the abstract than to implement such a policy change. practical.

If the United States cannot break the axis or ignore aspects of it, then it must plan for a changed strategic environment. This includes the very real possibility that the United States will have to fight more than one adversary in more than one theater at a time.

That's why the National Defense Strategy Commission, a bipartisan group of experts reviewing national defense strategies, in its most recent report called for the United States to develop a three-theater force structure, recognizing the reality that the United States faces concurrent challenges in India. -Pacific, Europe and Middle East and must therefore be ready to defend, with its allies and partners, its global interests in the three regions.

Of course, facing the combined weight of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is a herculean proposition. This will require a larger military and significantly greater defense spending. This may be a difficult political decision to convince. But today the United States spends on defense only about half of what it spent during the Cold War, as a percentage of GDP.

So, if America's leaders truly believe what they say in their strategic documents, that we are currently living in the most dangerous times since the Cold War and perhaps even since World War II, then it stands to reason that the United States will have to devote a similar level of effort to that of the United States. during these previous periods.

Even with increased spending, the United States still won't be able to go it alone. Although the United States advocates America First, ensuring the security and prosperity of the United States will be much less costly and more effective if Washington can draw on the combined strength of its global network of allies and partners.

Of course, this relies on the idea that allies and partners are net contributors rather than mere consumers of global security. As the United States increases its defense investments, its allies around the world must increase theirs in parallel.

Come January, there will be a new administration, a new strategy, and a potential opportunity to reevaluate America's strategic assumptions. It should start by recognizing that Washington does indeed care about many parts of the world and that the threats posed by the adversaries' axis, or whatever label you choose to describe it, are here to stay. It’s high time to plan accordingly.

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