Russian president Vladimir Putin’s declaration on September 12 that the war in Ukraine would directly involve NATO if Kyiv is permitted to use long-range weaponry is his most credible warning thus far in the conflict. The steady wave of Ukrainian drone attacks and the Kremlin’s failure to defend the Kursk region has highlighted Putin’s weak leadership. 

The primary military concern in the Kremlin is that Ukraine could begin conventional destruction of Russia’s long-range bomber and ballistic missile submarine fleets, indispensable components of Russia’s deterrent. It would also expose Russian military industry, strategic radar networks, training facilities, and tactical airpower to rapid attrition and subject symbols of Russian power, such as Red Square itself, to an exhibition of political weakness. Already, Russian drones and missiles sporadically overfly NATO countries. With tensions ramping up, it appears the world is closer to a direct NATO-Russia confrontation than ever before. 

However, wondering whether we are in the preliminary stage of a world war makes the tautological and erroneous assumption that the decision for war has always already been made. Leaders of revisionist states do make detailed plans for limited wars, like the one in Ukraine, before which they attempt to isolate their targets from potential allies. We can see this level of months-long planning in Adolf Hitler’s “Case White” invasion plan for Poland, the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, and the 1973 October War. This is also likely present in Chinese plans for Taiwan. 

In these cases, careful (though often unsuccessful) diplomatic planning was undertaken by the aggressor to keep the conflict within strict political limits and secure a consolidated peace after the operation. Although reversing the organizational inertia of war preparations is difficult, it is nevertheless possible. Mershon Center professor Randall Schweller, in his book Deadly Imbalances, shows convincingly that the Second World War was the result of the failure of the United States and USSR to make even a show of joint deterrence against Hitler’s ambitions. 

In his 1981 book Between Peace and War, Dartmouth professor Richard Ned Lebow explained that decisions to expand the war to win, termed “spin-off crises,” were usually desperate gambles to avert impending defeat. Germany’s initiation of unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917 is one such example. While crisis dynamics of misperception increase the likelihood that Putin will make a war decision to retaliate against a Western escalation of assistance to Ukraine, Russia’s lack of preparation for this contingency pushes it toward caution. Putin has likely not yet decided on a course of action because he, like most revisionist leaders pursuing limited wars, did not accurately estimate the escalation that could transform a local conflict into a global conflagration. 

Most recent conflicts, such as the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran, and the 1982 Falklands War, were decided precipitously amid crises over a period of days or at most, weeks. The implication is that the defending states did not appreciate that there was still sufficient time to organize and communicate a successful deterrence by seeking more allies. 

A second issue is that Russia calculates escalation dominance, and therefore nuclear deterrence, very differently from the governments of most Western liberal democracies. Whereas Western strategic culture sees nuclear war as an unthinkable, worst-possible outcome, in reality, the maritime insularity of many of them makes postwar reconstruction conceivable. In contrast, the Russian cultural memory of the genocidal German invasion renders a strategic nuclear exchange only a second-worst outcome. Even in a post-apocalyptic world, Russia depends on a functioning army to block territorial encroachments. Therefore, on each successive rung on the escalation ladder, Russia would be made disproportionately vulnerable. Furthermore, Russia has inherited the Soviet Union’s fear that a Western decapitation attack against its leaders would cause the country to disintegrate.

American journalist William R. Shirer, in his 1960 classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, shows that Adolf Hitler’s preparations for war and diplomatic maneuvering for advantage were far more wary of outright military provocations than Putin’s foreign policy today. Hitler made repeated appeals to the principle of self-determination for the Germans of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Danzig. International audiences reacted to these calls largely sympathetically, disarming most democracies. Putin, by contrast, has not pushed the same principle vocally for the Russian population of Donetsk or the Baltic states. This omission originates in Moscow’s need for internal legitimacy, which requires it to exercise military force within its sphere of influence, as Putin did in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria from 2015 to 2019. 

Putin further reveals his Russian insularity in his obliviousness to the double provocation he poses to the West. First, Western memories of the Second World War have produced an extreme suspicion of, and reluctance to appease, authoritarian leaders. Second, the lessons learned from Hitler’s successful dismantling of the Anglo-French, Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian alliances and the repeated Communist challenges to the West’s containment strategy during the Cold War have made NATO hyper-sensitive against abandoning smaller allies.

All of these factors have combined to make Western foreign policy far more assertive and far less conciliatory than it was in the leadup to the Second World War. On the other hand, what has not changed is the failure of the Western allies to make adequate military preparations to support their policy. As British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin pointed out in 1932, the democracies are always at least two years behind their authoritarian rivals in their preparations for war. While the war in Ukraine, the threat to Taiwan, and Iranian provocations receive plenty of political attention, the West’s Cold War approach of relying on nuclear weapons to deter aggression has been reversed to such an extent that it is now Russia and China who have both the means and the will to rattle the nuclear saber against an increasingly outmatched United States. Putin’s constant threats to the West prey on the public’s obvious fear of falling into an avoidable war and the evident unpreparedness of politicians for that extreme. But, as the West’s nuclear weakness grows ever more acute, they also represent a rational strategic option for an increasingly discredited and endangered regime.

Poor deterrence is often the result of compromises between domestic politics and objective defense needs. Although the United States formally entered the Second World War after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it had already positioned itself as a major backer of both Great Britain against Nazi Germany and China against Japan, making a war collision inevitable. President Franklin D. Roosevelt deployed convoy escorts to maximize encounters with German U-boats, used silver to shore up China’s bank, and cut off U.S. oil supplies to Japan after it completed the occupation of French Indochina. 

Under ideal circumstances, however, Roosevelt should have emulated his predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, who shared many of the same problems of overcoming isolationism and yet used the U.S. military build-up to compel Germany to negotiate an armistice. A similar increase in American military force under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, even if it did not directly end the Cold War, foreclosed the Soviet Union’s military option. U.S. presidents should be aware of the electoral consequences of neglecting foreign affairs and risking humiliation or defeat, such as in the case of the Korean War for the presidencies of Truman, the 1961 Bay of Pigs for John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War for Lyndon B. Johnson, or the 1979-80 Iran Hostage Crisis for Jimmy Carter. Therefore, rather than asking the theoretical question of whether war is coming, democracies should be advertising their own red lines backed by military force.

Clear measures are needed to defend against the latest threats to the liberal democratic community. The first challenge is to create a strategic global division of labor to disincentivize any Russian, Chinese, and Iranian attempts at exploiting the diversionary effect of a regional war. During the Second World War, Hitler believed Japanese distractions preserved Washington’s isolationist instincts. Japan’s cabinet held that U.S. concern about the German advance on Moscow would compel the United States to negotiate after Pearl Harbor. Until Europe reinforces its arsenals with a sizable conventional deployment, Putin will not be convinced of the credibility of NATO’s willingness to escalate. 

Presently, Poland’s entire military is only 216,000 strong. NATO boasts only eight battlegroups, totaling less than a division, in the rest of Eastern European member states. The advantage the Baltic regular and reserve forces likely currently enjoy facing a depleted Russian army is temporary. These forces are dwarfed by Putin’s September 2024 decree to expand Russia’s army to 1.5 million soldiers. 

The United States needs to convince European NATO member states to deploy a permanent force of at least four divisions distributed between Poland, the Baltic, and Finland, as well as diversionary assets in Georgia, Armenia, and Romania. The key is that U.S. involvement in Europe should be strictly limited, especially on the ground and at sea, so that it can concentrate on threats emanating from China. To deter Russian or Chinese goading of Iran and its allies, European NATO and the United States should jointly deploy a two-brigade force with air and naval support near the Persian Gulf, perhaps deployed on Masirah or Socotra Island or the UAE (possibly with Indian and Pakistani buy-in), to act in the event the Straits of Hormuz or the Bab el-Mandeb are interdicted. The United States must concurrently persuade Israel and Washington’s Near Eastern Arab allies to converge on a political solution that avoids the constant drain of U.S. war materiel, which would be a grave impediment in the event of a regional war with Russia or China.