Great Powers and the next World War?
Seventh Chancellor of the University of Guyana; Formerly Fellow at Harvard University; Author of ‘The Protective Function of the UN Security Council’ (forthcoming)
‘The Return of Great Powers. Russia, China, and the Next World War’ is the title of a powerful new book just published by Jim Sciutto, CNN’s prize-winning Chief national security analyst. He has served as a former US diplomat in China, has high national security clearance in the USA, and is able to interview high-level US leaders, including the Director of the CIA and an assortment of Generals, Admirals, Senators and Congressmen.
The start of the book finds Sciutto interviewing CIA Director, William Burns in the run-up to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. Burns, who had visited Moscow and Kiev in an effort to avoid war, tolds Sciutto: “The greatest risk in the new era of great power competition is not necessarily a deliberate decision to go to war, but a small encounter among the great powers spiralling into something far bigger.”
The book ends with Burn’s expression of hope that a third world war could be avoided. “I am not a hopeless person”, Burns said. “I think you could revive...hope”, to which Sciutto comments: “the great powers do not want great power war. And no one I spoke to for this book believes that other great power leaders are truly irrational actors. But the powers are pushing the limits and sometimes crossing them. And the path to avoiding wider conflict lies at the intersection of clear principles, power and cooperation.”
The goal, in Sciutto’s closing lines in the book, is to avoid a situation such as that which had arisen at the beginning of World War I, “when the great powers descend into war not because they choose to do so, but because they could not resist the momentum toward great power conflict.”
With its new-found riches and its seat on the UN Security Council, Guyana is now a key player on the world stage – while it faces mortal danger from Venezuelan aggression. These events are happening at a time when deep poverty persists in Guyana, when there is no political, economic, or social consensus in the country, and at a time when there has been no consultation with the people on the best path forward for conserving and using the country’s national resources, for protecting the environment, and whether to give priority to alleviating endemic poverty or to prioritise the building of infrastructure.
In an interview this week with the BBC, the President of Guyana, responding to a question about Venezuela’s threat to Guyana’s territorial integrity, said that
Guyana has ‘friends’ – whom he named and that, in the event of need, Guyana would call upon its friends. Venezuela also has ‘friends’, including Russia, China and Iran. And a Venezuelan incursion into Guyana could be in the interest of one or more of its friends, diminishing their isolation for having engaged in, or for threatening, territorial incursion.
One can be sure that when William Burns, the Director of the CIA, visited Guyana earlier in March, he would have come not only for a courtesy visit but to share his assessment about Venezuela’s intentions towards Guyana. William Burns goes to places where crisis is looming or has broken out, for example to Russia-Ukraine and to the Middle East for hostage negotiations. He is America’s point man for crises. When he turns up, he has a point to make!
So, Guyana is now in the embrace of the great powers. And on this topic, Jim Sciutto writes: “For the USA and its allies, this is a 1939 moment … 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.” Guyana is one of the “many others”. This invites the thought: How far would the USA go to defend Guyana’s territorial integrity?
In reflecting on this question, one should bear in mind the assessment of former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis, who told Sciutto, that Russia and the USA are already engaged in a “hybrid proxy war” in Ukraine: “One great power is fully engaged with troops and firepower, and on our side, we don’t have troops in there, but we do have money and ammunition.”
At the same time, one of Sciutto’s highlevel sources told him that America is now sending a message to Ukrainian leaders that western military support could no longer continue at the same level in the months ahead: “There’s just not enough money or political capital to last.” Another high-level source told Sciutto: “The West was now raising pressure on Ukraine to find a way to settle with Russia, including the radioactive topic of exchanging land for peace.” Land for peace sounds a familiar refrain.
The complexity of the global situation is sobering. Sciutto writes that, today, the return of great power competition has generated a new architecture of relations among powers great and small, “with many of the same forces that sparked war in 1914 and 1939, and very nearly did in 1962. There are new forces and fronts too. There are new territorial fronts, in places such as Ukraine, and emerging ones, in places such as Taiwan. There are new technological fronts from cyberspace to outer space to near space, as demonstrated by the Chinese balloon incident, and increasingly, each front is impacted by artificial intelligence. There are expanding alliances such as NATO, new ones such as the AUKUS [Australia, UK, USA] agreement, and less formal alliances and cooperative relationships among Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as among the US and European and Asian allies. And there are the radiating impacts of the war in Ukraine, affecting readiness and tensions across the globe. All these new forces coalesce into a witches’ brew of dangers.”
He drives the point home: “As CIA Director Burns told me in his office at Langley in late 2023, nations are navigating this new and more uncertain world order without many of the guardrails that had been built up in the last Cold War expressly to reduce the risk of a moment like this. As he said, they are ‘playing without a net’”
And where, one might ask, is Guyana’s safety net – internally as well as externally?