Imagine this scene: A week or so after the closing ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Russia invades Ukraine, its forces quickly rolling across the country, taking its capital city. At the same time, China launches a full-scale attack against Taiwan, intent on taking back what it views as a renegade province. The U.S. is then faced with three unsatisfactory choices: Engage in a two-front war, on opposite sides of the world, to counter Russian and Chinese aggression; pick one theater or the other, Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from moving past Ukraine and threatening its NATO allies, or the South China Sea to honor its commitments to protect Taiwan; or do nothing except bluster without effect in the U.N. and other fora as China and Russia reveal an ineffectual America to the world.

It’s what I call the Nightmare Scenario, and it’s not entirely implausible. I envisaged it independently, but a cursory review of informed opinion reveals it’s far from a unique view of what might ensue in coming days or weeks. And there really is no waking up from this nightmare, should it unfold. Regardless which of those unsatisfactory choices the U.S. makes, the world becomes a much more dangerous place, the threat of wider war, including the threat of nuclear war, grows exponentially, and a new power axis combining two of the world nuclear super powers, China and Russia, possibly augmented by Iran, emerges as a monster threat to the rest of the world.

While the U.S. re-positions a small number of troops, 3,000 compared with the 100,000-plus Russia has put in place, virtually encircling Ukraine, and China brazenly flies hundreds of sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the real problem is that it has already lost, strategically. Beginning with the Biden administration’s catastrophic surrender and evacuation from Afghanistan, and continuing with its focus on such demoralizing distractions as vaccine mandates and gender and race training within the ranks of the military, the country’s enemies have methodically evaluated Washington’s weakness.

Checkers v. Chess

Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are masters at assessing and sizing up their opponents. Both know that Biden isn’t quite there, doesn’t have a clue of his own what to do when faced with a crisis, has a back field of losers carried over from the Obama days, who for eight years oversaw American power being inexorably pushed back, and is seriously compromised in both Kyiv and Beijing. While Biden plays a feckless game of checkers, Putin and Xi are playing a high-level game of chess.

It’s been said so many times by so many observers that a weak America spells a dangerous world, and seldom has this been more apparent than at present. Any realistic assessment of the former Trump administration showed a real and determined show of American power that no one, least of all Putin and Xi, could easily dismiss. That all changed with the change of administration, and any doubts that might have remained in the minds of America’s enemies evaporated with the fall of Kabul last August. The events currently unfolding in the snows of Eastern Europe and over the waters of the Taiwan Strait, while in both cases anchored in decades of history, can be traced in the instant directly to America’s massive fail in Afghanistan and its feckless leaderless wandering since.

A relevant question, not one that can easily be dismissed, is why Biden is more concerned about Ukraine’s border than America’s own border. While every ilk of border jumper, including known terrorists, drug runners, sex traffickers, and a range of other criminals, is allowed across a virtually undefended Southwest Border and then sent, at taxpayer expense, all over the country, Biden emptily trumpets his commitment to the sanctity of Ukraine’s border, even to the point of alarming the country’s president, raising fear that Biden’s rhetoric might in fact invite a Russian attack.

Not the First Time

With Russian tanks and troops virtually encircling Ukraine, not just in Russia itself on Ukraine’s eastern border, but also to the north in Belarus, the south in Russian-annexed Crimea, and the west, in Moldova, it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t Putin’s plan to invade and crush the country. I don’t adhere to the idea that history repeats itself, but there are some lessons that can be learned from history.

Many of us remember the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and how Soviet tanks (the Russian war vehicle of choice) and 200,000 Soviet troops crushed Hungary’s push for independence from the Soviet sphere. After encouraging Hungarians to seek their liberation through incessant broadcasts on America’s Radio Free Europe, then-President Dwight Eisenhower, no dithering fool like the current occupant of the White House, fresh off the Korean War, decided it was fruitless to do anything to help the Hungarians and risk a nuclear confrontation, leading the freedom-seeking Hungarians to feel betrayed by America. Lyndon Johnson, already on his way out of office after his Vietnam fiasco, made a similar calculation in 1968 when the Soviets again used tanks and 200,000 troops, including those from several other Warsaw Pact countries, to crush the Prague Spring uprising in then-Czechoslovakia. And here we are again.

The Bigger Threat

With so much attention directed at Ukraine, the much bigger strategic threat posed by China has largely flown under the radar. China has increasingly made it clear its intent to take back Taiwan. Along with ratcheting up its rhetoric, it has taken increasingly provocative overt actions, including holding naval war games not far from the island and flying hundreds of military sorties over the course of recent months, including by fighter jets, H-6 strategic bombers, intelligence-gathering aircraft, and air freighters, into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. And just last Friday, Jan. 28, China’s ambassador to the U.S. warned that Taiwan’s continued push for independence would “most likely” lead to military conflict between the U.S. and China.

“If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road to independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict,” Ambassador Qin Gang told National Public Radio.

Keep in mind, as I’ve discussed in this space before in my reviews of the novels 2034 and Ghost Fleet, every simulation of conflict between those two “big countries” run in recent years shows China handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. This is not encouraging, even less so if the U.S. is pulled into a global two-front war, for which it is not prepared.

Especially given the controversy swirling around the Olympics, now under way, with Putin and XI shoulder to shoulder in Beijing, I tend to believe that any conflict, either in Ukraine or Taiwan, is unlikely to begin until after the Olympics. Of course the Olympics didn’t stop Putin from invading Georgia on the very eve of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics or taking Crimea from Ukraine shortly after the 2014 winter games, held in Sochi, Russia, or planning cyber attacks to disrupt the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics. China has denied U.S. claims that Xi asked Putin in December not to invade Ukraine during the current Beijing Olympics, and given the growing affinity between the former rivals Putin may not wish to take any glory away from Xi. But that doesn’t preclude action immediately after the games.

A Dangerous New Reality

Regardless whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated plays out or not, it is clear we’ve entered into a new and dangerous reality. We can expect to see growing coordination between China and Russia, and especially expanding Chinese economic and political influence and presence on a global scale. We’re already seeing its stifling influence on American corporations, universities, sports leagues, and other institutions, the culmination of a process more than three decades in the making.

Meanwhile, Biden’s green lighting of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea, makes Germany dependent on Russia for a major source of energy, enabling Putin’s threat in Eastern Europe to drive a wedge between NATO allies. And, if all that is not worrisome enough, we have a world-class grifter in the White House thoroughly bought off and compromised to China.

It is hard to imagine a more dangerous and precarious time than the one into which we’ve entered.

Featured image: A Chinese H-6K bomber is seen from a Russian aircraft during a joint patrol over the Western Pacific, Dec. 22, 2020. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Russian tanks on the move in Belarus. Copyright Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via Associated Press. Photo taken from video and released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022. Used under Fair Use.

Chinese Navy conducts live-fire exercises in waters near Zhoushan Islands north of Taiwan, August 2020. Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

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