https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China/dp/0593474139
作者:Jim Sciutto (Author) 2024 年 3 月 12 日
“这是一本引人入胜的 21 世纪边缘政策记述……每一位立法者或总统候选人都应该读一读,他们被误导认为让美国回到孤立主义的过去或与普京交好是当今世界的可行选择。”——《纽约时报书评》
CNN 主播兼首席国家安全分析师 Jim Sciutto 的新书必不可少,他通过报道权力前线(从现有的战争到全球迫在眉睫的战争)确定了一个新的、更不确定的全球秩序。
1989 年柏林墙的倒塌开启了弗朗西斯·福山所说的“历史的终结”。三十年后,乌克兰战争爆发时,吉姆·斯库托在 CNN 节目中表示,我们正处于“1939 年时刻”。历史从未终结——它几乎没有停顿——我们长期以来所熟知的全球秩序现已不复存在。强国决心在世界舞台上确立主导地位。随着它们对权力的争夺不断升级,新的秩序将影响全球所有人。俄罗斯入侵乌克兰是其中的一部分,但实际上,这场权力斗争影响着我们世界的每一个角落——从赫尔辛基到北京,从澳大利亚到北极。这是一场多线作战:在北极、在海洋和天空、在人工岛屿和重新绘制的地图上,以及在技术和网络空间。
通过对数十位政治、军事和情报领导人进行全球独家采访,斯库托将我们的时代定义为大国冲突的回归,“后冷战时代与一个全新且不确定的时代的明确决裂”。他以敏锐、透彻、亲临现场的报道,延续了 2019 年畅销书《影子战争:揭秘俄罗斯和中国击败美国的秘密行动》,该书重点关注隐藏冲突的秘密战术。
《大国回归》分析了历史性的、可见的实时转变。它详细描述了这个新的后冷战时代的现实、俄罗斯和中国政府日益结盟,以及新的全球核军备竞赛的爆发点。它提出了一个问题:当我们考虑不确定甚至可怕的结果时,西方、俄罗斯和中国是否有可能阻止一场新的世界大战?
评论《大国回归:俄罗斯、中国和下一场世界大战》
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/return-great-powers-russia-china-and-next-world-war
作者:Jim Sciutto
评论者:Lawrence D. Freedman
2024 年 9 月/10 月
发布于 2024 年 8 月 20 日
CNN 首席国家安全记者 Sciutto 描述了俄罗斯对乌克兰的战争以及中国对台湾的威胁,暗示莫斯科的成功可能会鼓舞北京。该分析并不是特别新颖,因为它来自对高级决策者和军方人物的采访,因此反映了他们的担忧。它的价值在于让人们了解有影响力的人物如何看待关键事件的展开,不仅在美国,而且在其他受影响的国家。例如,阅读台湾对中国威胁的看法以及台湾打算如何应对这一威胁是很有用的。修托的分析主要涉及试图辨别中国国家主席习近平的意图,以及俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京的意图,这一点从他对俄罗斯在乌克兰战争中使用核武器的可能性的长篇讨论中可以看出。不过,正如修托所表明的那样,试图了解美国前总统唐纳德·特朗普的想法并从他的过往经历中得出结论也会导致困惑和焦虑。
书评:我们距离下一次世界大战有多远
Scott Anderson 2024年4月3日 2018年4月9日,约翰·博尔顿(右)和特朗普总统在白宫。 EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
《大国回归——俄罗斯、中国和下一场世界大战》(The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War),作者:吉姆·休托
《武装起来——军事援助如何稳定以及动摇外国独裁者》(Up in Arms: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats),作者:亚当·E·凯西
在特朗普担任总统的那几年里,每隔几个月,伊朗就会展示一下它的弹道导弹——这种威力巨大的火箭可以将核弹头从一个国家发射到另一个国家——并在华盛顿引起一阵小小的恐慌。导弹测试是这样进行的:一枚导弹从伊朗的一个地方发射,穿过该国领空,理想情况下,会在数百公里之外伊朗的另一个地方爆炸,不造成任何伤害。
前白宫政治顾问约翰·凯利记得,有一次,在收到伊朗即将发射导弹的情报后,特朗普说他想把武器打下来。“先生,这是战争行为,”凯利回忆道自己这样告诉他。“你真的需要通过国会,至少获得授权。”
“他们绝不会同意的,”特朗普据说这样回答。
“我知道,”凯利说。“但我们的制度就是这样。”
这则轶事和其他许多令人震惊的场景出现在吉姆·休托的《大国回归》一书中,这本书对21世纪的边缘政策进行了引人入胜的描述。休托采访了特朗普的几位前顾问,其中包括凯利,后者讲述他只要暗示这些想法会损害这位前总统在公众舆论中的地位,就能劝说他放弃一些最糟糕的想法。凯利回忆说,当特朗普威胁要让美国撤出北约时,他对特朗普说:“从民意调查来看,美国人普遍认为我们应该参与世界事务。”
前国家安全顾问约翰·博尔顿对此更是直言不讳。“说实话,”他说,“那很可怕,因为直到最后一刻我们都不知道他会做出什么。”
这些政治人物能够如此坦率地表达,部分归功于休托作为CNN首席国家安全分析师的地位,以及他早先在奥巴马政府时期在国务院的工作经历。正如我们在本书中了解到的那样,他是那种人脉很广的记者,2022年2月的一个凌晨3点,一位不具名的国会议员打来一通电话提示他,乌克兰战争一触即发。
这也反映出,在危险的超级大国棋局展开之际,凯利和博尔顿等内部人士对特朗普再次掌权的前景感到多么恐惧。《大国回归》认为,我们正在经历一场冷战的翻版,美国再次与俄罗斯和中国对峙。从海底通信电缆到外太空卫星,再到日益发展的人工智能这一前线,这场战争正在每一条可以想象的战线上展开。
休托从俄罗斯入侵乌克兰之前的数天和数小时开始,在美国将军和国会领导人、芬兰外交官和台湾海军舰长等各色人物之间进行电影式的跳转。在后面的章节中,当俄罗斯战机逼近波罗的海附近演习的北约舰队时,他亲历的紧张感极为窒息,与中国战机在台湾海峡活动时的气氛遥相呼应,令人胆寒。
休托认为,这次冷战与上一次的一个重大区别是,为防止超级大国之间的竞争滑向灾难而设置的防护栏如今被不断拆除。在过去的四分之一个世纪里,美国和俄罗斯放弃了一个又一个军备控制条约,三个大国之间的沟通渠道也被有意减少。一位不愿透露姓名的国务院官员告诉休托,去年秋天,当一个神秘的中国气球飘过北美时,中国军方“拒绝接电话”。
火上浇油的是,朝鲜、伊朗、土耳其和沙特阿拉伯等代理捣蛋分子可能会认为挑起一场超级大国对决是有利的。这已经足以让那些距离风险最近的人躲进旧的地下防空洞。
或者足以促使他们与一位有声望的记者分享这些恐惧。几乎所有与休托对话的人都在这一点上达成一致:如果乌克兰战败,俄罗斯总统普京将会更加胆大妄为,再去攻击一个已经引起他觊觎的国家,也许是爱沙尼亚或摩尔多瓦。这也可能鼓励急不可耐的中国国家主席习近平强行用军事手段解决“台湾问题”,一些观察家认为这将是一场引爆世界大战的冲突。
在明确了风险之后,休托的谈话对象们也就解决方案达成了一致:坚定不移地保卫乌克兰;加强北约部队的整合;欧洲和亚洲民主国家集团之间更紧密的合作。具有讽刺意味的是,正是由于俄罗斯入侵乌克兰和中国对台湾的不断侵扰行为,这些建议中的许多项现在都已付诸实践,长期保持中立的瑞典和芬兰已加入北约,东亚各国也加强了共同防御条约。
但这并不意味着没有理由担心。再次成为共和党假定候选人的特朗普反对美国对乌克兰的军事援助,并敦促俄罗斯可以对那些未能履行财务义务的北约成员国“为所欲为”。休托所描述的一连串国际危险,与曾经最接近特朗普的一些前顾问的回忆一道,都是危险的噩梦。
2023年3月20日,习近平与普京在克里姆林宫。 AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
尽管有很多优点,《大国回归》有时在传达他人观点时有些蹩脚。休托会让他的主题绕着一些不是特别有趣或原创的点打转,有时这些论点甚至是难以理解的。例如,在对抗俄罗斯的问题上,他引用了一位西方高级外交官的话说:“认为我们做不到这一点的想法是完全错误的,但问题还在于我们在经济上和物质上都有这种能力。但是,我们在政治上有这个能力吗?这将是一场不同的游戏。但我担心吗?担心。”
如果我能明白他在说什么的话,我应该也会担心。尽管如此,这些对于休托作品的重要性来说都无足挂齿,每一位立法者或总统候选人都应该读一读这本书,他们都误以为让美国回到孤立主义的过去或与普京交好是当今世界的一个可行选择。
对于像美国这样的大国来说,理想的前进道路总是充满坎坷,回顾冷战的错误和成功往往具有启发性,但并非总是如此。亚当·E·凯西的《武装起来》写得很好,显然是大量研究的产物,这本书还表明了以冷战为鉴的做法有时会走得太远。
凯西曾是一名学者,现为美国国家安全分析师(奇怪的是,他对自己所在的美国政府部门未作具体说明)。他在书中开始重新审视广为人们所接受的观点,即在20世纪后半叶,美国对极权主义政权的援助有助于维持和延长那些独裁统治。在反驳这一论点时,他列出了一些最初引人注目的统计数据。根据他对数以百计冷战独裁政权的考察,苏联支持的统治者的平均存活时间是美国支持统治者存活时间的两倍。最令人震惊的是,在任何一年中,美国支持的独裁者倒台的可能性都是苏联支持独裁者的七倍。
不过,正如他指出的那样,苏联向附庸国输出了自己的军事模式,这意味着一支由共产党政委和反情报官员彻底渗透的武装部队,他们的主要任务是关注下级军官的意识形态坚定性,结果便产出了一支完全服从党和国家的军队,大大降低了军事政变的可能性。
相比之下,美国的军事模式要求建立一支独立于当时掌权暴君的反共军队,这往往会导致建立一个平行的权力基础,最终可能挑战该暴君。美国的方法不太持久,因为它经常导致反共军官领导的针对其他反共军官的循环式军事政变。
这些不同方式是如何改变了全球格局的?值得注意的是,几乎没有任何改变。凯西敏锐地指出,美国模式滋生了腐败、人权侵犯和政府不稳定,他还指出,在冷战那半个世纪里,只有一次军事政变——1960年的老挝——导致美国支持的政权进行了实际的意识形态调整,而且也只维持了短暂的时间。凯西解释说,这就是为什么美国冷战战士不愿意改变路线,尽管他们意识到了自己造成的混乱。
凯西大胆地表示,随着地球进入另一个超级大国角逐的时期,他的发现可能会发挥作用,但很难准确地看出昔日的军事代理动态将会如何再现。中国从未表现出将本国军事影响力扩展到亚洲以外的意向,而俄罗斯的军事指导在乌克兰惨淡的表现之后肯定会大打折扣。
至于美国,虽然在合适的时候会毫无保留地向暴君示好——看看它为了所谓的“反恐战争”都和什么货色同流合污吧——但在伊拉克和阿富汗战争留下的痛感未销之际,很难想象有谁会热切盼望着回到那些大举军备的日子。
即便如此,上一次冷战仍然持续了几十年。10年或20年后,痛感可能会消失。中国与乌干达和埃塞俄比亚等国的经济关系、俄罗斯对古巴和委内瑞拉的支持,以及美国在东南亚和中东的纠葛,都有可能从冷转暖,或从暖转至沸腾。如今,放弃民主十分盛行。大国领导人可能会开始关注像凯西这样受冷战启发的策略,这会给夹在中间的每个人带来可怕的后果。
《大国回归——俄罗斯、中国和下一次世界大战》 | 作者:吉姆·休托 | 都顿出版社 | 353页 | 30美元
《武装起来——军事援助如何稳定和破坏外国独裁者的稳定》作者:亚当·E·凯西 | Basic Books出版社 | 323页 | 32美元
The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War
https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China/dp/0593474139
by Jim Sciutto (Author) March 12 2024
“An absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship . . . . one that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.” –New York Times Book Review
The essential new book by CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto, identifying a new, more uncertain global order with reporting on the frontlines of power from existing wars to looming ones across the globe.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, Jim Sciutto said on CNN’s air as the Ukraine war began, that we are living in a “1939 moment.” History never ended—it barely paused—and the global order as we long have known it is now gone. Powerful nations are determined to assert dominance on the world stage. And as their push for power escalates, a new order will affect everyone across the globe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a part of it, but in reality, this power struggle impacts every corner of our world—from Helsinki to Beijing, from Australia to the North Pole. This is a battle with many fronts: in the Arctic, in the oceans and across the skies, on man-made islands and redrawn maps, and in tech and cyberspace.
Through globe-spanning, exclusive interviews with dozens of political, military, and intelligence leaders, Sciutto defines our times as a return of great power conflict, “a definitive break between the post–Cold War era and an entirely new and uncertain one.” With savvy, thorough, in-person reporting, he follows-up his 2019 bestseller, The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America, which focused on the covert tactics of a hidden conflict.
The Return of Great Powers analyzes a historic and visible shift in real time. It details the realities of this new post–post–Cold War era, the increasingly aligned Russian and Chinese governments, and the flashpoint of a new, global nuclear arms race. And it poses a question: As we consider uncertain, even terrifying, outcomes, will it be possible for the West and Russia and China to prevent a new World War?
Review The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/return-great-powers-russia-china-and-next-world-war
By Jim Sciutto
Reviewed by Lawrence D. Freedman
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, describes Russia’s war against Ukraine and China’s threats toward Taiwan, suggesting that Moscow’s success could embolden Beijing. The analysis is not particularly original, as it is drawn from interviews with senior policymakers and military figures and so reflects their concerns. Its value lies in providing a sense of how influential people viewed key events as they unfolded, not just in the United States but also in other affected countries. It is useful, for example, to read Taiwanese views of the Chinese threat and how the island proposes to meet it. Much of Sciutto’s analysis involves trying to discern the intentions of Chinese President Xi Jinping and, as demonstrated by a long discussion of the possibility of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine, those of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then again, as Sciutto shows, attempts to read former U.S. President Donald Trump’s mind and draw conclusions from his track record can also lead to confusion and anxiety.
What's the Quickest Path to World War III?
In “The Return of Great Powers” and "Up in Arms,” Jim Sciutto and Adam E. Casey consider modern-day superpower conflict through the lens of the past.
John Bolton, right, and President Trump in the White House on April 9, 2018.Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press
By Scott Anderson April 2, 2024
Scott Anderson’s most recent book is “The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — A Tragedy in Three Acts.”
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War, by Jim Sciutto
UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats, by Adam E. Casey
Every few months in the years that Donald J. Trump was president, Iran made a show of its ballistic missiles — the powerful rockets that can deliver nuclear warheads from one nation to another — and set off a small panic in Washington. The tests went like this: A missile flew up from one part of Iran, traveled through the country’s airspace and, ideally, blew up harmlessly in another part of Iran, hundreds of miles away.
The former White House political adviser John Kelly remembers that, on one such occasion, after intelligence of an impending missile launch came in, Trump said he wanted to shoot the weapon down. “Well, sir, that’s an act of war,” Kelly recalls telling him. “You really need to go over to Congress and get at least an authorization.”
“They’ll never go along with it,” Trump apparently replied.
“Well, I know,” Kelly said. “But that’s our system.”
This anecdote and many other alarming scenes appear in Jim Sciutto’s “The Return of Great Powers,” an absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship. Sciutto has interviewed several of Trump’s former advisers, including Kelly, who explains that he managed to talk his old boss out of some of his worst ideas only by suggesting they would hurt his standing in public opinion. “Americans, generally speaking by polling, think that we should be involved in the world,” he recalls telling Trump when the president threatened to pull the United States out of NATO.
The former national security adviser John Bolton is even more blunt about this episode. “Honest to God,” Bolton says, “it was frightening because we didn’t know what he was going to do up until the last minute.”
That such political figures would speak so candidly can be partly credited to Sciutto’s standing as CNN’s chief national security analyst and his earlier stint with the State Department under Barack Obama. He’s the kind of well-connected reporter who, as we learn in this book, gets a call at 3 a.m., in February 2022, from an unnamed Congress member to warn him that a war in Ukraine is imminent.
It also reflects the unbridled horror that insiders like Kelly and Bolton feel at the prospect of a second Trump administration taking charge amid a perilous superpower chess game. “The Return of Great Powers” argues that we are living through a Cold War redux that once again pits the United States against Russia and China. The battle is being waged on every imaginable front, from undersea communication cables to satellites in outer space and the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.
Sciutto begins with cinematic jumps between an eclectic assortment of personalities — American generals and congressional leaders, Finnish diplomats and Taiwanese naval captains — in the days and hours leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In later sections, the white-knuckle tension he experiences as Russian warplanes close in on a NATO fleet conducting exercises near the Baltic Sea is eerily echoed by Chinese jets operating in the Taiwan Strait.
One great difference between this cold war and the last, Sciutto contends, is that the guardrails erected to prevent superpower rivalries from sliding into catastrophe have been steadily dismantled. Over the past quarter-century, both the United States and Russia have abandoned one arms control treaty after another and lines of communication between all three powers have been purposely reduced. As one unnamed State Department official tells Sciutto, when a mysterious Chinese balloon drifted across North America last fall, the Chinese military “refused to pick up the phone.”
Add to this precarity those proxy mischief-makers — North Korea, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to name a few — that might see advantage in provoking a superpower showdown. It’s enough to send those with a front-row view into the old basement bomb shelter.
Or to cause them to share their fears with a reputable journalist. Virtually all of Sciutto’s interlocutors are aligned: A defeated Ukraine will embolden Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to attack one of the other countries, perhaps Estonia or Moldova, that have already caught his covetous eye. It might also encourage an impatient Xi Jinping of China to force a military solution to “the Taiwan question,” an event that some observers see as a precursor to global war.
Having identified the peril, Sciutto’s panelists also agree on the solutions: unwavering commitment to the defense of Ukraine; greater integration of NATO forces; much closer cooperation between the European and Asian blocs of democratic nations. Ironically, many of these recommendations are now being enacted thanks to the Russian invasion and Chinese encroachments — long-neutral Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and East Asian nations have strengthened their mutual defense pacts.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for concern. Trump, once again his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has fought against U.S. military aid to Ukraine and urged Russia “to do whatever the hell” it wants to NATO members who fail to meet their financial obligations. The litany of international dangers Sciutto describes, set alongside the recollections of some of Trump’s closest former advisers, is the stuff of unholy nightmares.
For all its strengths, “The Return of Great Powers” sometimes displays a peculiar awkwardness in conveying others’ views. Sciutto can let his subjects meander around points that are not particularly interesting or original — or, at times, even comprehensible. On the matter of standing up to Russia, for example, he quotes a senior Western diplomat as stating: “The idea that we can’t do this is completely false, but the problem is also economically and physically we have that capability. But then, do we have it politically? It’s going to be a different game. But am I concerned? Yes.”
I suppose I’d be concerned, too, if only I could grasp what he’s talking about. Still, these are mere quibbles when set against the import of Sciutto’s book, one that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.
The ideal way forward for a great power like the United States has always been fraught, and looking back at the mistakes and successes of the Cold War is often instructive, but not always. Adam E. Casey’s “Up in Arms” is well written and clearly the product of prodigious research; it also shows how Cold War comparisons can sometimes go too far.
Casey, a former academic who is now a national security analyst for a curiously unspecified branch of the U.S. government, sets out to re-examine the accepted wisdom that U.S. aid to totalitarian regimes served to maintain and prolong those dictatorships during the latter half of the 20th century. In rebutting this thesis, he sets out some statistics that are initially eye-catching. According to his examination of hundreds of Cold War authoritarian regimes, Soviet-supported rulers survived, on average, twice as long as American-supported ones. Most startling, in any given year, U.S.-backed dictators were about seven times more likely to fall than their Soviet counterparts.
As he points out, though, the Soviets exported their own military model to client states, which meant an armed forces thoroughly infiltrated by Communist Party commissars, and counterintelligence officers whose primary focus was keeping watch over the ideological steadfastness of their own rank and file. The result was an army wholly subordinate to the party and the state, drastically reducing the odds of a military coup.
By contrast, the U.S.-military model called for building out an anti-communist army independent of whatever tyrant happened to be in power at the time, often leading to the creation of a parallel power base that might ultimately challenge said tyrant. The American method was less durable, because it often yielded a round robin of military coups led by anti-communist officers against other anti-communist officers.
How did these different approaches alter the global chessboard? Remarkably, hardly at all. While Casey astutely points out that the American model was a perfect breeding ground for corruption, human rights abuses and governmental instability, he also notes that over the entire half-century span of the Cold War, only one military coup — Laos in 1960 — led to an actual ideological realignment of a U.S.-backed regime, and then only briefly. This is why, Casey explains, American cold warriors weren’t inclined to change course, despite their awareness of the chaos they had wrought.
Casey gamely suggests his findings might have currency as the planet enters another period of superpower jockeying, but it is hard to see precisely how this military-proxy dynamic of yore replicates itself. China has never shown much interest in extending its martial reach to countries beyond Asia, and Russian military tutelage is surely trading at a deep discount after its dismal Ukrainian outing.
As for the United States, while displaying little reservation about cozying up to despots when convenient — witness some of the grotesqueries it has climbed into bed with for the so-called “war on terror” — it’s hard to imagine any eagerness to go back to the days of army-building in the wake of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan war hangovers.
That being said, the last Cold War went on for decades. In 10 or 20 years, the hangovers could fade. China’s economic ties to countries like Uganda and Ethiopia, Russia’s support of Cuba and Venezuela and American entanglements in Southeast Asia and the Middle East all have the potential to turn from cold to warm, or from warm to boiling hot. Giving up on democracy is all the rage these days. The leaders of the great powers could start eyeing Cold War-inspired playbooks like Casey’s, with dire results for everyone caught in between.
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War | By Jim Sciutto | Dutton | 353 pp. | $30
UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats | By Adam E. Casey | Basic Books | 323 pp. | $32
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline
https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China/dp/0593474139
by Jim Sciutto (Author) March 12 2024
“An absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship . . . . one that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.” –New York Times Book Review
The essential new book by CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto, identifying a new, more uncertain global order with reporting on the frontlines of power from existing wars to looming ones across the globe.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, Jim Sciutto said on CNN’s air as the Ukraine war began, that we are living in a “1939 moment.” History never ended—it barely paused—and the global order as we long have known it is now gone. Powerful nations are determined to assert dominance on the world stage. And as their push for power escalates, a new order will affect everyone across the globe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a part of it, but in reality, this power struggle impacts every corner of our world—from Helsinki to Beijing, from Australia to the North Pole. This is a battle with many fronts: in the Arctic, in the oceans and across the skies, on man-made islands and redrawn maps, and in tech and cyberspace.
Through globe-spanning, exclusive interviews with dozens of political, military, and intelligence leaders, Sciutto defines our times as a return of great power conflict, “a definitive break between the post–Cold War era and an entirely new and uncertain one.” With savvy, thorough, in-person reporting, he follows-up his 2019 bestseller, The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America, which focused on the covert tactics of a hidden conflict.
The Return of Great Powers analyzes a historic and visible shift in real time. It details the realities of this new post–post–Cold War era, the increasingly aligned Russian and Chinese governments, and the flashpoint of a new, global nuclear arms race. And it poses a question: As we consider uncertain, even terrifying, outcomes, will it be possible for the West and Russia and China to prevent a new World War?
Review The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/return-great-powers-russia-china-and-next-world-war
By Jim Sciutto
Reviewed by Lawrence D. Freedman
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, describes Russia’s war against Ukraine and China’s threats toward Taiwan, suggesting that Moscow’s success could embolden Beijing. The analysis is not particularly original, as it is drawn from interviews with senior policymakers and military figures and so reflects their concerns. Its value lies in providing a sense of how influential people viewed key events as they unfolded, not just in the United States but also in other affected countries. It is useful, for example, to read Taiwanese views of the Chinese threat and how the island proposes to meet it. Much of Sciutto’s analysis involves trying to discern the intentions of Chinese President Xi Jinping and, as demonstrated by a long discussion of the possibility of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine, those of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then again, as Sciutto shows, attempts to read former U.S. President Donald Trump’s mind and draw conclusions from his track record can also lead to confusion and anxiety.
What's the Quickest Path to World War III?
In “The Return of Great Powers” and "Up in Arms,” Jim Sciutto and Adam E. Casey consider modern-day superpower conflict through the lens of the past.
John Bolton, right, and President Trump in the White House on April 9, 2018.Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press
By Scott Anderson April 2, 2024
Scott Anderson’s most recent book is “The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — A Tragedy in Three Acts.”
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War, by Jim Sciutto
The former White House political adviser John Kelly remembers that, on one such occasion, after intelligence of an impending missile launch came in, Trump said he wanted to shoot the weapon down. “Well, sir, that’s an act of war,” Kelly recalls telling him. “You really need to go over to Congress and get at least an authorization.”
“They’ll never go along with it,” Trump apparently replied.
“Well, I know,” Kelly said. “But that’s our system.”
This anecdote and many other alarming scenes appear in Jim Sciutto’s “The Return of Great Powers,” an absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship. Sciutto has interviewed several of Trump’s former advisers, including Kelly, who explains that he managed to talk his old boss out of some of his worst ideas only by suggesting they would hurt his standing in public opinion. “Americans, generally speaking by polling, think that we should be involved in the world,” he recalls telling Trump when the president threatened to pull the United States out of NATO.
The former national security adviser John Bolton is even more blunt about this episode. “Honest to God,” Bolton says, “it was frightening because we didn’t know what he was going to do up until the last minute.”
That such political figures would speak so candidly can be partly credited to Sciutto’s standing as CNN’s chief national security analyst and his earlier stint with the State Department under Barack Obama. He’s the kind of well-connected reporter who, as we learn in this book, gets a call at 3 a.m., in February 2022, from an unnamed Congress member to warn him that a war in Ukraine is imminent.
It also reflects the unbridled horror that insiders like Kelly and Bolton feel at the prospect of a second Trump administration taking charge amid a perilous superpower chess game. “The Return of Great Powers” argues that we are living through a Cold War redux that once again pits the United States against Russia and China. The battle is being waged on every imaginable front, from undersea communication cables to satellites in outer space and the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.
Sciutto begins with cinematic jumps between an eclectic assortment of personalities — American generals and congressional leaders, Finnish diplomats and Taiwanese naval captains — in the days and hours leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In later sections, the white-knuckle tension he experiences as Russian warplanes close in on a NATO fleet conducting exercises near the Baltic Sea is eerily echoed by Chinese jets operating in the Taiwan Strait.
One great difference between this cold war and the last, Sciutto contends, is that the guardrails erected to prevent superpower rivalries from sliding into catastrophe have been steadily dismantled. Over the past quarter-century, both the United States and Russia have abandoned one arms control treaty after another and lines of communication between all three powers have been purposely reduced. As one unnamed State Department official tells Sciutto, when a mysterious Chinese balloon drifted across North America last fall, the Chinese military “refused to pick up the phone.”
Add to this precarity those proxy mischief-makers — North Korea, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to name a few — that might see advantage in provoking a superpower showdown. It’s enough to send those with a front-row view into the old basement bomb shelter.
Or to cause them to share their fears with a reputable journalist. Virtually all of Sciutto’s interlocutors are aligned: A defeated Ukraine will embolden Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to attack one of the other countries, perhaps Estonia or Moldova, that have already caught his covetous eye. It might also encourage an impatient Xi Jinping of China to force a military solution to “the Taiwan question,” an event that some observers see as a precursor to global war.
Having identified the peril, Sciutto’s panelists also agree on the solutions: unwavering commitment to the defense of Ukraine; greater integration of NATO forces; much closer cooperation between the European and Asian blocs of democratic nations. Ironically, many of these recommendations are now being enacted thanks to the Russian invasion and Chinese encroachments — long-neutral Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and East Asian nations have strengthened their mutual defense pacts.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for concern. Trump, once again his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has fought against U.S. military aid to Ukraine and urged Russia “to do whatever the hell” it wants to NATO members who fail to meet their financial obligations. The litany of international dangers Sciutto describes, set alongside the recollections of some of Trump’s closest former advisers, is the stuff of unholy nightmares.
For all its strengths, “The Return of Great Powers” sometimes displays a peculiar awkwardness in conveying others’ views. Sciutto can let his subjects meander around points that are not particularly interesting or original — or, at times, even comprehensible. On the matter of standing up to Russia, for example, he quotes a senior Western diplomat as stating: “The idea that we can’t do this is completely false, but the problem is also economically and physically we have that capability. But then, do we have it politically? It’s going to be a different game. But am I concerned? Yes.”
I suppose I’d be concerned, too, if only I could grasp what he’s talking about. Still, these are mere quibbles when set against the import of Sciutto’s book, one that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.
The ideal way forward for a great power like the United States has always been fraught, and looking back at the mistakes and successes of the Cold War is often instructive, but not always. Adam E. Casey’s “Up in Arms” is well written and clearly the product of prodigious research; it also shows how Cold War comparisons can sometimes go too far.
Casey, a former academic who is now a national security analyst for a curiously unspecified branch of the U.S. government, sets out to re-examine the accepted wisdom that U.S. aid to totalitarian regimes served to maintain and prolong those dictatorships during the latter half of the 20th century. In rebutting this thesis, he sets out some statistics that are initially eye-catching. According to his examination of hundreds of Cold War authoritarian regimes, Soviet-supported rulers survived, on average, twice as long as American-supported ones. Most startling, in any given year, U.S.-backed dictators were about seven times more likely to fall than their Soviet counterparts.
As he points out, though, the Soviets exported their own military model to client states, which meant an armed forces thoroughly infiltrated by Communist Party commissars, and counterintelligence officers whose primary focus was keeping watch over the ideological steadfastness of their own rank and file. The result was an army wholly subordinate to the party and the state, drastically reducing the odds of a military coup.
By contrast, the U.S.-military model called for building out an anti-communist army independent of whatever tyrant happened to be in power at the time, often leading to the creation of a parallel power base that might ultimately challenge said tyrant. The American method was less durable, because it often yielded a round robin of military coups led by anti-communist officers against other anti-communist officers.
How did these different approaches alter the global chessboard? Remarkably, hardly at all. While Casey astutely points out that the American model was a perfect breeding ground for corruption, human rights abuses and governmental instability, he also notes that over the entire half-century span of the Cold War, only one military coup — Laos in 1960 — led to an actual ideological realignment of a U.S.-backed regime, and then only briefly. This is why, Casey explains, American cold warriors weren’t inclined to change course, despite their awareness of the chaos they had wrought.
Casey gamely suggests his findings might have currency as the planet enters another period of superpower jockeying, but it is hard to see precisely how this military-proxy dynamic of yore replicates itself. China has never shown much interest in extending its martial reach to countries beyond Asia, and Russian military tutelage is surely trading at a deep discount after its dismal Ukrainian outing.
As for the United States, while displaying little reservation about cozying up to despots when convenient — witness some of the grotesqueries it has climbed into bed with for the so-called “war on terror” — it’s hard to imagine any eagerness to go back to the days of army-building in the wake of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan war hangovers.
That being said, the last Cold War went on for decades. In 10 or 20 years, the hangovers could fade. China’s economic ties to countries like Uganda and Ethiopia, Russia’s support of Cuba and Venezuela and American entanglements in Southeast Asia and the Middle East all have the potential to turn from cold to warm, or from warm to boiling hot. Giving up on democracy is all the rage these days. The leaders of the great powers could start eyeing Cold War-inspired playbooks like Casey’s, with dire results for everyone caught in between.
UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats | By Adam E. Casey | Basic Books | 323 pp. | $32
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline