Washington persists in its vague assurances about the defense of Taiwan, refusing to deploy ground troops as it had done as recently as 1979. This made sense at the time since Washington was exploiting the Sino-Soviet split that had developed since 1959. Siding with Beijing compelled the Soviets to shift one-third of their entire military and tactical nuclear arsenal to the East of the Ural Mountain range.

Today, the long frontiers of Norway and Finland and the former’s Arctic possessions, if violated by Russia, would likely produce an immobile stand-off. This dysfunctional response during the Second World War, the Sitzkrieg (or “sitting war”), was a seven-month period of inactivity after the September 1939 attack on Poland, during which Germany was afforded the time to build up and then conquer Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, and France, by June of 1940. 

Fortunately, today, declaratory policy and operational plans are far more explicit for the defense of Baltic NATO allies and Poland, the Straits of Hormuz, Filipino South China Sea islands, South Korea, and Japan, largely because U.S. forces are deployed there on the ground. In some instances, such as the war in Ukraine, deterrent ambiguity is useful because it robs Putin of the ability to activate outrage among Russia’s mobilization-age cohort. Thus, Moscow is trapped in a war whose expense is multiplied by the need to employ relatively ineffective technical expedients, such as using rocket bombardments to shift Ukrainian public opinion, and the predicament of having to hire overpaid foreign mercenaries and contractors.

U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were constrained by American public opinion and their own strategic myopia about abandoning the people of Eastern and Central Europe to Bolshevism at the end of the Second World War, without which a confrontation with the Soviet Union would have been far more short-lived. Obviously, the American and British populations were hardly in the mood to support a new war aimed at pushing the large Soviet army back to its borders. However, as with the implied nuclear threat by President Truman against Soviet forces backing the Azeri separatists in the Iranian civil war in 1946, the United States could have intimidated a Soviet retreat out of much of Eastern Europe and thereby avoided the Cold War confrontation with the Warsaw Pact. 

Consequently, contesting local threats to allies today, by Russia, China, and Iran, is vital because authoritarian states have repeatedly proven that they are capable of accumulating occupied people and redirecting their productive efforts against the spread of democracy. We see this coercive harnessing of free people into supporting authoritarian economies in how Beijing has suppressed the people of Hong Kong and how Russia has demonstrated its brutal occupations of Chechnya and parts of Ukraine, such as Mariupol.

The theory of the stability-instability paradox explains that the reciprocal deterrence by the 12,000-ton Nazi arsenal of Tabun nerve gas and Allied VX gas and biological weapons defaulted the Second World War to be fought by tanks and incendiary bombs. A very similar dynamic could neutralize the nuclear arsenals of China and the United States, leading to a conventional war over Taiwan, or at least delay the first desperate use of a nuclear weapon to signal a desperate resolve from the loser. 

Deterring China, Russia, and Iran under these circumstances will require NATO and its democratic allies to focus on defending the smaller states on the peripheries. China will not attack Taiwan directly, nor will Russia drive directly into Poland, nor will Iran seize both shores of the Straits of Hormuz. Rather, by applying erosion tactics, they will all attack easier tangential targets that can be accumulated and later contribute to a major attack. China will boldly seize the offshore Taiwanese Islands, including Pratas and Taiping Island, Russia will target Norwegian Arctic island possessions, and Iran will push cohorts more deeply into Iraq. To preserve the peace, the democratic frontline should be pushed out to the periphery.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University and the author of Militarization and War (2007) and Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO).

This article was originally published in Modern Diplomacy and is reprinted here with some modifications with permission from the publication.

Image: Tom Buysse / Shutterstock.com.