The Risk of U.S. Defeat in a ‘Two-Front’ War with Russia and China

The U.S. Currently Has no Contingency Plans for How it can Fight and Win a Simultaneous War with Both Allied Nuclear Superpowers Over Eastern Europe and Taiwan.

This article was originally published in The National Interest on October 4, 2021.

In a previous article, “The Increasing Threat of a Cataclysmic Sino-Russian Attack on the U.S. Homeland,” I discussed the dangers to U.S. national security from the breathtaking advances by China and Russia in expanding the size of their nuclear arsenals to a level far in excess of the size of the current U.S. nuclear arsenal. The more that Russia’s and China’s superiority over the United States in terms of nuclear and other unconventional weapons such as super-Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and cyberweapons, as well as in terms of overall nuclear war survivability, continues to increase, the greater their temptation will be to engage in increasingly brazen international aggression abroad. We have already seen examples of this happening with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, China’s occupation of disputed islands in the South China Sea over the last several years, and what appears to be an increasingly imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan.