From War to Tug-of-War: The Global Fight for Connectivity

Parag Khanna

Global Governance, Asia

Today's superpowers thrive on economic supply chains, not military might.

It wasn’t long after the collapse of the Soviet Union that American defense strategists had identified the new World War III scenario: Taiwan. Nearly a quarter century later, Taiwan remains on the tip of the geopolitical tongue. The election of the nationalist DPP in January has rattled cross-Strait relations. Beijing called on Taipei to abandon any “hallucinations” of independence. With tensions already flaring over the disputed South China Sea, this could be the beginning of the escalation spiral towards World War III many have feared for so long.

Taiwan isn’t the only World War III scenario experts have warned about in the past twenty-five years. India and Pakistan went nuclear in 1998, with the Kargil crisis ensuing a year later. Without a personal intervention by President Bill Clinton, many believe one or both of the South Asian rivals might indeed have pulled the trigger. More recently, China and Japan have come close to the brink several times, such as in 2010, when Japanese patrol boats rammed a Chinese trawler, and subsequently when the governor of Tokyo agreed to buy three of the disputed Senkaku Islands from their private owner, sparking enraged Chinese citizens to attack Japan’s embassy in Beijing. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spent much of 2014 traveling from Davos to DC, warning the world that 1914 was playing out all over again. In 2015, Japan’s parliament lifted the country’s long-standing ban on overseas military operations, while the country weighs reviving its nuclear weapons program.