I am a child of the Cold War; I remember the duck-and-cover drills in school and the look on my father's face during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. However scary terrorism might be, it is nothing compared to nuclear holocaust.

So I had an alarming, back-to-the-future sensation when reading an article titled "How to Win America's Next War" in the spring issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

The article was written by Elbridge Colby, who was the lead Pentagon official in developing the 2018 National Defense Strategy. It bears the direct hand and support of Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, as well as his deputy (and now secretary nominee) Patrick Shanahan, who overrode the status quo bureaucracy.

The gist of the Pentagon's strategic review is that the military needs to shift its primary focus away from fighting terrorists and rogue states to prepare to fight Russia and China. Colby's argument in Foreign Policy is not quite Winston Churchill's 1938 book, "While England Slept." Still, it is an argument for waking up.


But until I read Colby's article, I had not realized the degree to which both Russia and China have revitalized and reshaped their militaries.

With the end of the Cold War, America became — for a time — the planet's dominant military power. But in recent years, Russia and China were building weapons systems that could quickly wipe out our forward bases and make the cost of counterattacking in, say, Taiwan, prohibitively high.

Both China and Russia already have, or in China's case, soon will have, the capacity to create a fait accompli. By making it too costly for the United States to "take back" Taiwan or Estonia, our rivals can go on to intimidate and coerce our allies in places such as Japan, the Philippines or Poland.


But the reality of modern warfare, with longer-range missiles and cyberattacks, means that America needs to be able to fight Russian or Chinese aggression right away. The risk of doing otherwise is especially stark when facing a nuclear power. There would have been no D-Day to liberate Europe if Adolf Hitler had possessed nukes.

Despite its headline — "How to Win America's Next War" — Colby's article offers few suggestions on precisely how to blunt a Chinese or Russian attack. Still, alarmist headlines aside, the point is not to engage in a war but to avoid one.

The old truism — that the best way to avoid a war is to be prepared to fight one — has a special and specific meaning in the scenarios envisioned by the Pentagon's strategic review. The only condition under which the United States would actually fight is if China or Russia seized territory, invading the Baltics or Taiwan, for example.

The Pentagon officials who wrote the National Defense Strategy are not arguing for a pre-emptive strike. If China and Russia stay on their side of the line, they have nothing to worry about.




Evan Thomas is the author of "Ike's Bluff" and "First: Sandra Day O'Connor." This op-ed was distributed by the Washington Post News Syndicate.