Thomas Friedman was mistaken in his 2003 book Longitudes and Attitudes that 9/11 was the start of World War 3 or that the invasion of Iraq was D-Day, both of which presupposed that the theater of war was no longer the European Continent, but the Middle East, where radical Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda have sought refuge and financing for their terrorist activities. The book was released at a time when Osama Bin Laden was still alive, then considered as the United States’ Public Enemy Number 1. The hunt for Bin Laden and the subsequent efforts to dismantle the grip of the Taliban in Afghanistan cost the US two trillion dollars, only to lose the country to the terror organization as soon as President Joe Biden announced that it will leave the country.
But nobody knew what was on the mind of President Vladimir Putin at the start of the new millennium, Russia being busy with its dalliances with the West, its money and luxury brands pouring into the state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin even offered to send troops to help NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) with its peacekeeping missions. The UN was busy in Iraq and the US just occupied Afghanistan in 2001. This was a decade before Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, though John Mearsheimer has mentioned that Putin started to feel agitated by NATO way back in 2008 when the Western Alliance stated its plan to expand near the Russian border, which it did.
This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Pyongyang during the anniversary of the Armistice between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and South Korea, with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un showcasing his nuclear-capable missiles. The same armaments have been banned by the United Nations. The US has expressed alarm over Moscow’s ties with Pyongyang. But above all else, this gesture actually suggests that the Cold War is not yet over, that the battle between Communism and Democracy is not dead, and that the world is still at the brink of a potential total destruction if a nuclear holocaust is not prevented from happening.
Political scientists have thought that the machines of war no longer involved conventional weapons. Terror groups do not have tanks nor planes. They have IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and suicide bombers. But this suggestion is mistaken. For the most part, the conflicts in Yemen and Syria suggest the significance of the industrial military complex. But I do not refer to how US arms can help create peace in the most troublesome regions of the world. Rather, the saber-rattling by Russia with its threat of using tactical nuclear weapons and the visit of a nuclear-capable US Submarine to South Korea all point to the undying conflict between the two most powerful political ideologies of our time.
The new world order today is a world created by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who directed the Manhattan Project, a secret plan to create the first nuclear bomb. Considered the father of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer was said to have uttered a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, “I have become death.” Since the Los Alamos Project, Oppenheimer publicly campaigned against nuclear proliferation, ultimately losing his security clearance as the top adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission for having been faulted on Russia’s advance in the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Many are in agreement that the US is the remaining superpower in the world. But unlike World War 2, we cannot just talk about nations possessing the most powerful weapons. Ideas are probably more dangerous than rogue states. Nobody predicted before February 24, 2022 that Putin would launch a war against Ukraine, not that there were no warning signs, but then President Trump was actually busy with his trade wars against China. A year into the conflict and with all the restrictions imposed pertaining to the flow of goods and money into Russia, China is carrying Putin behind its back, supplying it with the needed tools to carry on with its war against NATO. The end of the world may be near.
