The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War

by Jim Sciutto

The return of great powers has upended

the post–Cold War global order and replaced it with a new, less stable one.

For the US and its allies, this is a 1939 moment. The US still celebrates standing up to an expansionist Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. After World War II, the world descended into a new Cold War between the US and an expansionist USSR. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many celebrated the “end of history.” Now, Russia intends to bring the international order down, and China to create an entirely new one. The US has difficult decisions ahead in both spaces, and many others.

The prevailing view among Finnish officials was that Putin was not simply manufacturing this historical justification for war. He was a true believer. For Putin, his manufactured history was the truth. The doubters were ignorant.

“Permanent war.” This was the essence of the “Gerasimov Doctrine”—the Russian military strategy for great power conflict, as laid out by the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Valery Gerasimov. This means—to Russian leaders—never-ending conflict on multiple fronts.

“Russians are not very well trained,” Kelly added. “In World War I, World War II, Afghanistan, they have always been short on tactical skill. They win by massive firepower and not caring who they kill. They’re intentionally hitting civilian targets.”

Russian forces, on the other hand, reserve decision-making to only the highest ranks. “The Russians are very top-down, very controlling,” said Kelly. “One thing Stalin would never buy is too many people taking the initiative. Communist regimes didn’t want their people thinking. Warfare is so chaotic. If you haven’t developed your people so that they’re very good on their own, I think you will always lose to someone who is doing that.”

The math is simple and alarming: Ukraine fires in two to three days what the US produces in an entire month.

“It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the four hundred thousand American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly told me. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough-guy thing.”

Trump’s admiration for Hitler went further than the German leader’s economic policies. Trump also expressed admiration for Hitler’s hold on his senior officers—senior Nazi officers, that is. Trump lamented that Hitler, as Kelly recounted, maintained his senior staff’s “loyalty,” while Trump himself often did not.