Thucydide‘s Trap by Graham Allison features a scenario of escalating conflict between the US and China in the South Chinese Sea conflict that I found very chilling. Iirc the scenario is just like you mentioned, each side doing from her perspective legitimate moves, protecting dearly hold interests, drawing lines in the sand and the outcome is escalation to war. The underlying theme is conflicting dynamics when a reigning power is challenged by a rising power. You probably saw the book mentioned, I found it very worth reading.
And you didn‘t mention cyber warfare, which is what pops into my mind immediately. I haven‘t looked into this, but I imagine that potential damage is very high while proper international peace-supporting and deescalating norms are much more lagging behind compared to physical conflicts.
Thanks for your comment. US-China tension currently seems most likely to me to cause great power conflict, and cyber capabilities were mostly what I had in mind for “offense outpaces defense” scenarios. I think this post is more valuable if it’s more general, though, and I don’t know enough about US-China, cyber capabilities, or warfare to say much more specifically.
I think understanding possible futures of cyber capabilities would be quite valuable. I would not be surprised to look back in 2030 or 2040 and say:
Civilization was just devastated by cyberattacks. In retrospect, it should have been obvious — or rather, the rest of us should have listened to those who were sounding the alarm. Since the 2000s, it’s been clear that offense is easy and defense is hard. Since the 2010s, great powers have had the capability to devastate one another’s cities with cyberattacks. In the last few years, offensive capabilities strengthened and proliferated. Then dozens of agents had the capability to cause countless explosions, destroy infrastructure, and take down electric grids almost everywhere, and it was only a matter of time until unilateral or multilateral forces led one to do it.
But again, such work is not my comparative advantage (and, as a disclaimer for the above paragraph, I don’t know what I’m talking about).
From the same reference, twelve out of 16 times that there has been a switch in which is the most militarily powerful country in the world, there has been war (though one should not take that literally for the current situation). China will likely become the most powerful (economically at least) in the next few decades, unless the US allows a lot more immigration.
Thucydide‘s Trap by Graham Allison features a scenario of escalating conflict between the US and China in the South Chinese Sea conflict that I found very chilling. Iirc the scenario is just like you mentioned, each side doing from her perspective legitimate moves, protecting dearly hold interests, drawing lines in the sand and the outcome is escalation to war. The underlying theme is conflicting dynamics when a reigning power is challenged by a rising power. You probably saw the book mentioned, I found it very worth reading.
And you didn‘t mention cyber warfare, which is what pops into my mind immediately. I haven‘t looked into this, but I imagine that potential damage is very high while proper international peace-supporting and deescalating norms are much more lagging behind compared to physical conflicts.
Thanks for your comment. US-China tension currently seems most likely to me to cause great power conflict, and cyber capabilities were mostly what I had in mind for “offense outpaces defense” scenarios. I think this post is more valuable if it’s more general, though, and I don’t know enough about US-China, cyber capabilities, or warfare to say much more specifically.
I think understanding possible futures of cyber capabilities would be quite valuable. I would not be surprised to look back in 2030 or 2040 and say:
But again, such work is not my comparative advantage (and, as a disclaimer for the above paragraph, I don’t know what I’m talking about).
From the same reference, twelve out of 16 times that there has been a switch in which is the most militarily powerful country in the world, there has been war (though one should not take that literally for the current situation). China will likely become the most powerful (economically at least) in the next few decades, unless the US allows a lot more immigration.