The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2021 33 mercenaries and “little green men” have been active in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, Libya and the Mediterranean, and pose a gray zone threat that is real even if it is one of a very different kind. China’s potential for reform has given way to Xi Jinping and a mas- sive military buildup and efforts to compete on a global level. The South China Sea may have at least partially replaced the Middle East—and cer- tainly any form of terrorism—as the key threat for U.S. strategic and mili- tary planning. As the Fiscal Year 2022 defense budget proposal shows all too clearly, the funds for counterterrorism and counterextremism have shrunk to very low levels by defense spending standards, and China and Russia have become the key focus. As for other powers and threats, North Korea is a nuclear power, and Iran’s nuclear status is unclear. Some 70 years after the Korean War, North Korea is more of a threat than at any time since the cease-fire. Iran has now been hostile for nearly half a century, and the net impact of U.S. security efforts and sanctions has been the continuation of a hard-line regime that has now developed major links to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria and important elements in Iraq and Yemen. Planning for deterrence and warfighting in these conflicts involves many elements of irregular warfare by state and nonstate actors, but extremist and terrorist groups are comparatively minor players. Moreover, warfighting and deterrence are under- going radical change in all of the world’s major military powers. Joint all-domain warfare, long-range precision conventional strike capabilities, other forms of precision strike systems and newmilitary efforts in space, cyber and artificial intelligence are all making major changes in the character of military forces. Irregular and “gray zone” warfare, the role and manipulation of nonstate actors, and civil wars are also significant ongoing threats. In most cases, however, these threats are not dominated by ter- rorists or extremists. They are dominated by factions and regimes that pursue irregular warfare because it is their best option for competing with the more conventional military resources of larger and more developed powers like the United States. Here, the U.S. also faces threats from nations like China that so far seem to compete more effectively on a civil-military level. Here the U.S. needs to focus more on Sun Tzu than Clausewitz. Hopes for Global Unity More broadly, the United States must now deal with the near collapse of hopes for the kind of “globalism” that would unite the world and a shift to stable, functional democracies that would mark the “end of history.” Potential models of global unity such as the European Union have not only lost a key country like Britain, but have also seen several Eastern European states shift away from democracy. U.S. efforts to forge a Trans-Pacific Partner- ship have ended up benefitting China. And, for at least the last four years, the U.S. focus on burden sharing, gaining economic advantage and avoiding issues such as climate change made the country more of a “nationalist” entity than any form of “globalist.” Efforts such as those of the World Bank to assess the quality of governance, the “Fragile States Index,” the U.S. State Depart- ment Country Reports on Human Rights, the U.N. demographic estimates and Human Development Indicators, and Transpar- ency International’s corruption ratings all highlight the growing number of nations that face serious internal divisions, domestic economic challenges and have failed or corrupt governance. Some countries have made real progress, but these indices show that more states have declined in capability than gained. More- over, the hopes for change triggered by various political upheav- als—especially broader upheavals like the “Arab Spring”—have instead led to a world in which many governments pose a broader America’s “long wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq were never wars against terrorism or extremism per se. In Barwana, Iraq, Marines search a house for insurgents, weapons caches and explosives during a patrol on June 16, 2006. ROESEIGLE/WIKIMEDIA