A U.S. historian and political scientist warns that the United States and its allies may have less than a decade to keep China from triggering a conflict in the western Pacific that could spiral into global war.

“I worry about a scenario in which (Chinese President) Xi (Jinping) thinks that the future beyond 2030 and 2035 is starting to look fairly cloudy for China in economic and strategic terms but (that) he has a window of opportunity to shift things—vis-a-vis Taiwan, for instance—before the end of this decade,” Hal Brands told The Asahi Shimbun in a recent interview.

In his article “The Next Global War” published in the Foreign Affairs magazine, Brands, a Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, noted that current regional conflicts resemble the ones that eventually evolved into World War II.

“With wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East already raging, and ties between revisionist states becoming more pronounced, all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945,” he wrote.

Brands said the United States is not prepared for a conflict in the western Pacific, let alone a multi-theater global war, but that the country and its allies could effectively deal with China based on the lessons of history.

He emphasized that a mix of resolve and restraint will be required.

“You have to provide a degree of assurance that the United States and other countries are not going to try to overthrow the Chinese regime, support Taiwanese independence or otherwise exploit the challenges that a peaking China faces,” he said.

Excerpts from the interview with Brands follow:

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Question: Will you elaborate on the similarities between the current international situation and the period from World War I to World War II?

Brands: The current international situation is characterized by several regional conflicts, which began for their own reasons but are becoming more interwoven in dangerous ways.

You have Iran and China supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine. You have Russia selling more advanced weaponry to Iran and potentially supporting the Houthis (pro-Iranian, anti-government military movement in Yemen) in various ways with the conflicts in the Middle East.

You have both (Russia and Iran) tightening their relationships with China, as China pushes more assertively, although still short of war, in the western Pacific.

That’s not actually that dissimilar from the way that World War II started.

We remember World War II as a global war because that’s what it ultimately became, but it started as three separate regional conflicts, with three separate regional sources of tension that were centered on the programs of expansion that Germany, Italy and Japan were pursuing in their respective regions (Europe, Africa and Asia).

What ultimately happened is that those conflicts became fused more tightly together as new international alignments developed (among the three countries), and then they climaxed and merged in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

That’s the parallel that I find most distressing between the interwar period and today.

Q: Could a conflict in the western Pacific trigger the next global war?

Brands: Under any circumstances, a war in the western Pacific would be cataclysmic because it would pit the two most powerful countries in the world, China and the United States, against each other.

It would spread very quickly as U.S. allies and other countries got involved. It would involve significant risks of nuclear escalation from the outset because this would be the first high-intensity conflict between two nuclear-armed great powers.

It would cause a degree of economic devastation that would make the disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine look minor in comparison.

But what makes it particularly dangerous is that there would be strong incentives for other autocratic powers to find ways of either exploiting American distraction (from their own countries) or helping to ensure that China would not be decisively defeated because that would leave the remainder of the autocratic states more isolated.

If it looked like the United States was waging a war in East Asia and its military was getting chewed up in the process, that would be a very good opportunity for Russia or Iran to behave more aggressively in their own regions.

Conversely, if the fear was that China was going to lose a war with the United States, Russia in particular would try to find ways of aiding China, perhaps not by entering the fighting directly but through cyberattacks or provision of material or other aid short of outright intervention in the war, so that Russia did not have to face a triumphant United States by itself after China was defeated.

Q: If conflicts broke out in all of the three regions, would the United States be able to respond to the challenges?

Brands: There are real questions about whether the United States is ready for a conflict in the western Pacific. Certainly, there are shortages of munitions (due to the ongoing conflicts) that would be dangerous.

The United States would find it very difficult to replace ships or submarines that were lost in the fighting. Just a war in the western Pacific would pose immense strains on the United States and the U.S. defense industrial base.

It’s pretty clear that the United States is not prepared for a scenario in which there are conflicts in multiple theaters at once.

The U.S. defense industrial base is being stressed right now just by demand of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, wars in which the United States is either not directly involved or only modestly involved in the case of the Middle East.

If you were to have an area where the United States was involved in high-intensity hot wars in two theaters at once, it would strain the U.S. military to the breaking point.

That’s not just a U.S. problem, though. It’s also a problem that afflicts U.S. allies. The United States should be able to draw on its allies in any of these conflicts, and many of its allies (would) face similar challenges with having overtaxed militaries and overtaxed defense industrial bases.

The more encouraging cases are the ones that we find in the western Pacific in East Asia, where South Korea and Japan increasingly have defense programs that allow them to contribute significantly.

Q: How should democratic countries, including the United States and Japan, respond to avoid such a nightmare scenario?

Brands: The key is to create a strong deterrent by showing those revisionist powers (that challenge the existing international order) that they are likely to lose if they use force to try to reorder two regions in significant ways.

The United States and Japan are cooperating to try to firm up their defense posture in the western Pacific, specifically on some of the islands running south from (Japan’s) main island down toward Taiwan.

If you look at some of the coalition-building activity that’s been occurring in that region--the U.S.-South Korea-Japan (trilateral partnership), the U.S.-Japan-Philippines (trilateral partnership), the Aukus (U.S.-Britain-Australia trilateral partnership) or other arrangements--that’s very encouraging as well.

The challenge is that it is difficult to develop credible combat powers on a short-term basis, and that is really the challenge that the United States and its allies face because the situation is getting worse in the western Pacific and they may not have a decade in which to prepare.

Q: Do you think authoritarian countries, such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, are forming an “axis” against Western countries as Germany, Italy and Japan did in the interwar period?

Brands: You always have to be careful with analogies. When one says the word “axis,” it obviously makes people think of World War II.

The critical difference is that while Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have done bad things, none of them have pursued conquests on a scale like anything we saw in the 1930s and 1940s yet.

But the level of concrete cooperation within the Tripartite Pact within the World War II-era Axis was actually very minimal. There was very little defense technological cooperation, for instance.

That’s different today. There’s actually far more meaningful defense technological cooperation between Russia and China, even between Russia and Iran, and perhaps between Russia and North Korea than there was within the Tripartite Pact in the run-up to World War II.

These countries are finding ways of cooperating. They’re finding ways of strengthening each other, and they’re even learning from one another.

It was very interesting that the missile and drone strike package that Iran used to attack Israel in April looked a lot like the missile and drone strike packages that Russia has used, sometimes using Iranian-made drones, against Ukraine.

Clearly, these countries are aiding each other. They are watching what their fellow autocracies are doing, and they're drawing lessons from that.

In a very important sense, there is a growing degree of alignment between these countries and it exacerbates the threat that each of them poses.

Q: Democracy has suffered a setback around the world. In democratic countries, the political and social division and the polarization are becoming more prominent. How are these trends affecting authoritarian countries?

Brands: Yeah. I think there is something to that.

The political problems that the autocracies face are far more severe than the political problems that the democracies face.

If you look at (Wager Group founder Yevgeny) Prigozhin’s revolt against (Russia’s) Putin regime just last year or if you think about the succession challenges that will occur once (Chinese President) Xi Jinping leaves power, autocracies tend to look strong until they aren’t and then tensions build up until they finally explode.

That said, the democracies are also dealing with their own political challenges.

If you look at the Group of Seven summit a couple of months ago, it was notable that five or perhaps six of the leaders who were there were in very weak political positions, and the next time the G-7 meets, you may have new leaders in several of those countries.

If we’re just thinking specifically about the United States, there are two interlocking challenges.

One is the challenge that is posed by a Republican Party that has become increasingly captured by a neo-isolationist sentiment, and particularly when it is led by Donald Trump, it is no longer as committed to international projects that the United States has led since 2002.

The other is the greater uncertainty, the tension, the polarization within the political system, which can have very disruptive effects, as we saw with the events that followed the 2020 election (such as the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021).

The democracies still have a lot of advantages that stand them in good stead, and their free political institutions are at the top of that list because they allow the democracies to engage in open debate about what they’re trying to achieve.

Q: If Donald Trump returns to the White House, how do you think those revisionist countries will respond?

Brands: It’s very hard to answer that question, in part because different revisionist countries have different preferences regarding the U.S. election.

I am sure that the Russians would prefer that Trump win because he has signaled that he is not in favor of continuing the support to Ukraine.

I would imagine that North Korea might favor a Trump presidency because it would hope that it could get back into the negotiations it had with Trump (when he was president) the first time around and maybe achieve some easing of sanctions.

For Iran, it’s maybe different. Iran would be likely to face more economic pressure from a Trump administration even though it might also profit a little bit if Trump kept talking about the United States getting out of the Middle East.

With respect to China, my understanding is that the Chinese leadership expects that they’re not going to like the U.S. policy one way or another because there’s a bipartisan consensus on competition with China.

But it might actually somewhat prefer a (Kamala) Harris administration to a Trump administration, simply because Trump is less predictable.

As a general matter, the choice that a lot of revisionist states would have to face is essentially this.

If they see a United States that looks less committed to international security under a Trump presidency, they could try to take advantage by pushing harder to exploit that situation in the South China Sea or in the Taiwan Strait, for instance.

Or if they think that Trump is doing damage to American alliances, (they could think it would) be better to just sit back and allow that process to play out and see if perhaps you find yourself in a stronger position four years from now.

Q: You co-authored a book, “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China.” What can we learn from history to avoid a conflict with China?

Brands: The first thing we need to learn is revisionist powers often become most aggressive not when they are confident about the future but when they worry that their power is peaking and starting to decline.

That was the challenge that Germany faced for World War I, for example.

The reason I worry about Chinese behavior in the latter part of this decade is that China is entering an era of economic stagnation. It’s entering an era where its ambitions are encountering headwinds on the international stage. Its growth is not going to be sufficient to allow it to overtake the United States anytime soon, if ever.

But the one area where China is not yet peaking is in military power because China’s military buildup has continued at pace and it is rapidly changing the balance in the western Pacific.

I worry about a scenario in which Xi thinks that the future beyond 2030 or 2035 is starting to look fairly cloudy for China in economic and strategic terms but (that) he has a window of opportunity to try to shift things--vis-a-vis Taiwan, for instance--before the end of this decade, which is when the military modernization programs of the United States, Japan and other democratic countries really start to bear fruit.

That’s one lesson, which is to beware of the peaking power.

The second lesson is that navigating these situations requires a mix of resolve and restraint.

Resolve in the sense that you have to create very high penalties for aggression and move quickly in the ways that we’ve discussed to convince Xi that an invasion of Taiwan or blockade of Taiwan may not be successful.

At the same time, you have to provide a degree of assurance that the United States and other countries are not going to try to overthrow the Chinese regime, support Taiwanese independence or otherwise exploit the challenges that a peaking China faces.

This is a very delicate situation. It’s one that the United States and its allies dealt with fairly successfully during the Cold War, when they had to deal with a declining but still prickly and dangerous Soviet Union during the first half of the 1980s in particular, and that a similar mix of resolve and reassurance is going to be needed in the coming years.

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Hal Brands is a Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

He has served as special assistant to the U.S. secretary of defense for strategic planning and the lead writer for the Commission on the National Defense Strategy for the United States.

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(This article is based on an interview by Taketsugu Sato, a senior staff writer.)