The economic consequences would be equally severe. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which produces the world’s most advanced semiconductors, would seriously damage the US and the global economy, regardless of Washington’s response. (To this end, the United States has attempted to move more semiconductor production home.) But a war between the US and China would risk catastrophic losses. RAND researchers estimate that a years-long conflict would cut in America’s gross domestic product by 5 to 10 percent. In contrast, the US economy shrank 2.6 percent in 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession. The rise in the price of gas at the start of the war in Ukraine offers just a small taste of what a war between the US and China would bring. For the roughly three-fifths of Americans currently living paycheck to paycheck, the war would come home to millions of lost jobs, failed retirements, high prices and shortages.
In short, a war with Russia or China would likely wound the United States on a scale without precedent in the living memory of most citizens. That, in turn, brings great uncertainty about how the US political system would perform. Getting in would be the easy part. More elusive is whether the public and its representatives would maintain the will to fight over remote areas in the face of ongoing physical assaults and economic disasters. If millions become unemployed, will they consider Taiwan’s cause worth their sacrifice? Could national leaders convincingly explain why the United States paid the heavy price of World War III?
These questions will be asked during a conflict, so they should be asked in advance. Even those who think the United States should fight for Ukraine or Taiwan have an interest in educating the public about the stakes of great-power conflict in the nuclear and cyber era.
The last nuclear-related sign I saw a few weeks ago proudly declared a small liberal suburb of Washington, DC, a “nuclear-free zone.” “Duck and Cover” Deserves a 21st Century Remake – Something More Memorable Than the Department of Homeland Security’s “Nuclear Explosion” fact sheet, which nevertheless contains sound advice. (After the shockwave passes, for example, you have 10 minutes or more to seek shelter before the fallout arrives.) For any moral condemnation of adversaries’ actions, Americans should hear candid assessments of the cost of trying to stop them . A war game broadcast on “Meet the Press” offered one model in May. Even better to follow it up with a peace game, which shows you how to avoid devastation in the first place. Without raising public awareness, political leaders risk achieving the worst-case scenario: fighting World War III and losing it when the country backs down.
AWhile international relations have deteriorated in recent years, so have critics of US global primacy often warned that a new cold war was brewing. I have been Amongst them. But pointing to a cold war in some ways underestimates the danger. Relations with Russia and China will certainly not remain cold. During the original Cold War, American leaders and citizens knew that survival was not inevitable. World-shaking violence remained an all-too-possible destination of the superpower struggle, until its astonishing end in 1989.
Today, the United States is once again assuming the primary burden of countering the ambitions of governments in Moscow and Beijing. When it did so the first time, it lived in the shadow of the world war and acted out of a frank and healthy fear of another. This time, lessons will have to be learned without that experience.
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and visiting professor at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of “Tomorrow, the world: the birth of US global supremacy.”
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