„Kovo mėn., kai prezidentas Bidenas patyrė spaudimą sustiprinti JAV įsitraukimą į Ukrainą, jis atsakė keturis kartus per vieną dieną, iškviesdamas Trečiojo pasaulinio karo šmėklą.Sovietai atsitraukė po to, kai Kennedy slapta pažadėjo iš Turkijos pašalinti JAV raketas Jupiteris.
Nuo karinės operacijos Ukrainoje pradžios jis grasino juos panaudoti.
"In March, as President Biden was facing pressure to intensify U.S. involvement in Ukraine, he responded by invoking the specter of World War III four times in one day.
“Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III,” he said, “something we must strive to prevent.” He underscored the point hours later: “The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews — just understand, and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say, that’s called World War III, OK?”
A few years ago, it was still possible to expect a benign geopolitical future. Although “great power competition” became the watchword of Pentagonese, the phrase could as easily imply sporting rivalry as explosive conflict. Washington, Moscow and Beijing would stiffly compete but could surely coexist.
Yet how many Americans can truly envision what a third world war would mean? Just as great power conflict looms again, those who witnessed the last one are disappearing. Around 1 percent of U.S. veterans of World War II remain alive to tell their stories. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, fewer than 10,000 will be left. The vast majority of Americans today are unused to enduring hardship for foreign policy choices, let alone the loss of life and wealth that direct conflict with China or Russia would bring.
For four decades, America’s postwar presidents appreciated that the next hot war would likely be worse than the last. In the nuclear age, “we will be a battlefront,” Truman said. “We can look forward to destruction here, just as the other countries in the Second World War.” This insight didn’t keep him or his successors from meddling in Third World countries, from Guatemala to Indonesia, where the Cold War was brutal. But U.S. leaders, regardless of party, recognized that if the United States and the Soviet Union squared off directly, nuclear weapons would lay waste to the American mainland.
Nuclear terror became part of American life, thanks to a purposeful effort by the government to prepare the country for the worst. The Federal Civil Defense Administration advised citizens to build bomb shelters in their backyards and keep clean homes so there would be less clutter to ignite in a nuclear blast. The film “Duck and Cover,” released in 1951, encouraged schoolchildren to act like animated turtles and hide under a makeshift shell — “a table or desk or anything else close by” — if nukes hit. By the 1960s, yellow-and-black signs for fallout shelters dotted American cities.
The specter of full-scale war kept the Cold War superpowers in check. In 1950, Truman sent U.S. troops to defend South Korea against invasion by the Communist North, but his resolve had limits. After Gen. Douglas MacArthur implored Truman to blast China and North Korea with 34 nuclear bombs, the president fired the general. Evoking the “disaster of World War II,” he told the nation: “We will not take any action which might place upon us the responsibility of initiating a general war — a third world war.”
The extreme violence of the world wars and the anticipation of a sequel also shaped President John F. Kennedy’s decisions during the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union moved to place nuclear weapons 90 miles from Florida. Kennedy, who had served in the Pacific and rescued a fellow sailor after their ship went down, grew frustrated with his military advisers for recommending preventative strikes on Soviet missile sites. Instead of opening fire, he imposed a naval blockade around Cuba and demanded that the Soviets withdraw their missiles. A one-week superpower standoff ensued. Approximately 10 million Americans fled their homes. Crowds descended on civil defense offices to find out how to survive a nuclear blast.
The Soviets backed down after Kennedy secretly promised to remove U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
The world had come so close to nuclear Armageddon that Kennedy, citing the danger of a third and total war, took the first steps toward détente before his death in 1963.
But memory is never static. After the Soviet Union collapsed and generations turned over, World War II was recast as a moral triumph and no longer a cautionary tale.
In the 1990s, an outpouring of film, history and literature celebrated the “greatest generation,” as journalist Tom Brokaw anointed those who won the war for America. Under their watch, the United States had saved the world and stopped the Holocaust — which retrospectively vaulted to the center of the war’s purpose, even though stopping the mass murder of European Jews was not why the United States had entered. A new generation, personally untouched by great power war, reshaped the past, revering their elders but simplifying the often varied and painful experiences of veterans.
In this context, the double lesson of the world wars — calling America to lead the world but cautioning it not to overreach — narrowed to a single-minded exhortation to sustain and even expand American power. Presidents began to invoke World War II to glorify the struggle and justify American global dominance. On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1991, George H.W. Bush told the country that “isolationism flew escort for the very bombers that attacked our men 50 years ago.” Commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, Bill Clinton recalled how the Allied troops gathered “like the stars of a majestic galaxy” and “unleashed their democratic fury,” fighting a battle that continued.
In 2004 the imposing World War II Memorial, one decade and $197 million in the making, went up between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. George W. Bush, a year into invading Iraq, gave the dedication: “The scenes of the concentration camps, the heaps of bodies and ghostly survivors, confirmed forever America’s calling to oppose the ideologies of death.” Preventing a repeat of World War II no longer involved exercising caution; it meant toppling tyrants.
Besides, why dwell on the horrors of global conflict at a time when no such thing even seemed possible? With post-Soviet Russia reeling and China poor, there were no more great powers for the United States to fight. Scholars discussed the obsolescence of major war.
The deaths of more than 7,000 service members in the post-Sept. 11 wars — and approximately four times as many by suicide — devastated families and communities but were not enough to produce a Vietnam-style backlash. Likewise, although the wars have cost a whopping $8 trillion and counting, the payments have been spread over decades and passed to the future.
The “acute threat,” as the new National Security Strategy states, comes from Moscow. President Vladimir Putin controls thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy civilization many times over.
Since the military operation in Ukraine, he has threatened to use them.
Mr. Putin could plausibly act on that threat under several scenarios: if U.S. or NATO forces directly enter the conflict, if he believes his rule is threatened or if Ukrainian forces verge on retaking Crimea. No one knows precisely what might prompt the Kremlin to employ a nuclear weapon, but Mr. Biden recently said that the risk of Armageddon was the highest it has been since the Cuban missile crisis.
Mr. Biden has ruled out using force to defend Ukraine. His administration is pursuing a finely tailored objective: It seeks to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield in order to strengthen its hand in peace negotiations. That goal does not commit the United States to ensuring a complete Ukrainian victory. Yet the Ukrainian Army’s recent successes have prompted American commentators to redouble their backing for Kyiv and further marginalize talk of diplomacy (not that Mr. Putin has shown any readiness to stop).
Despite Mr. Biden’s caution toward Russia, he is contributing to the rising chances of conflict with China. In a series of interviews, he asserted that the United States has a commitment to defend Taiwan (in fact, it is obligated only to help arm the island) and vowed to send U.S. troops in the event of a Chinese invasion. These repeated gaffes are likely intended to deter Beijing in light of its many recent military maneuvers around the island. But especially in tandem with high-level congressional visits to Taipei, they risk implying that the United States wishes to keep Taiwan permanently separated from the mainland — a position it is hard to imagine Beijing will ever accept.
A series of recent war games held by think tanks help us to imagine what it would look like: First, a war will likely last a long time and take many lives. Early on, China would have incentives to mount a massive attack with its now highly developed long-range strike capability to disable U.S. forces stationed in the Pacific. Air Force Gen. Mark D. Kelly said that China’s forces are “designed to inflict more casualties in the first 30 hours of combat than we’ve endured over the last 30 years in the Middle East.”
In most rounds of a war game recently conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States swiftly lost two aircraft carriers, each carrying at least 5,000 people, on top of hundreds of aircraft, according to reports. One participant noted that although each simulation varied, “what almost never changes is it’s a bloody mess and both sides take some terrible losses.” At some stage, those Selective Service registrations required of young American men might need to be expanded and converted into a draft.
Second, each side would be tempted to escalate. This summer, the Center for a New American Security held a war game that ended with China detonating a nuclear weapon near Hawaii. “Before they knew it,” both Washington and Beijing “had crossed key red lines, but neither was willing to back down,” the conveners concluded. Especially in a prolonged war, China could mount cyberattacks to disrupt critical American infrastructure. It might shut off the power in a major city, obstruct emergency services or bring down communications systems. A new current of fear and suspicion would course through American society, joining up with the nativism that has reverberated through national politics since Sept. 11.
The economic consequences would be equally severe. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which produces most of the world’s advanced semiconductors, would profoundly damage the U.S. and global economy regardless of Washington’s response. (To this end, the United States has been trying to move more semiconductor manufacturing home.) But a U.S.-China war would risk catastrophic losses. Researchers at RAND estimate that a yearlong conflict would slash America’s gross domestic product by 5 to 10 percent. By contrast, the U.S. economy contracted 2.6 percent in 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession. The gas-price surge early in the Ukraine war provides only the slightest preview of what a US.-China war would generate. For the roughly three-fifths of Americans who currently live paycheck to paycheck, the war would come home in millions of lost jobs, wrecked retirements, high prices and shortages.
The last nuclear-related sign I saw, a few weeks ago, proudly declared a small liberal suburb of Washington, D.C., to be a “nuclear-free zone.” “Duck and Cover” deserves a 21st-century remake — something a bit more memorable than the Department of Homeland Security’s “Nuclear Explosion” fact sheet, which nonetheless contains sound advice.
For every moral condemnation of adversaries’ actions, Americans should hear candid assessments of the costs of trying to stop them. A war game broadcast on “Meet the Press” in May offered one model. Even better to follow it with a peace game, showing how to avoid devastation in the first place.
As international relations have deteriorated in recent years, critics of U.S. global primacy have frequently warned that a new cold war was brewing. I have been among them. Yet pointing to a cold war in some ways understates the danger. Relations with Russia and China are not assured to stay cold. During the original Cold War, American leaders and citizens knew that survival was not inevitable. World-rending violence remained an all-too-possible destination of the superpower contest, right up to its astonishing end in 1989.
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.”"
„35–44 metų vyrai, nepaisydami stiprios ekonomikos, patiria blankų atsigavimą po pandemijos praradusio darbo.Vaizdo žaidimų kokybė pagerėjo, todėl likti namuose galėjo tapti patraukliau.
Ponia Blumenauer sakė, kad amžiaus grupė yra grupė, „kurios nematome pasirodant“.
Kaip ir darbo jėgos ekspertai, vyriausybės duomenys rodo, kad veikia jėgų derinys.
Ponui Rizzo ši trapumo teorija yra prasminga.
„Sulaukęs 20-ies neturėjau ką parodyti savo gyvenime“, – paaiškino jis.
„Gavau ugnį, gerai“, – pasakė jis. „Visas mano portfelis buvo padegtas.
Veteranas laiko save laimingu. Jis pažįsta jo kartos vyrus, kurie sunkiai įsitvirtino darbo rinkoje.
