The prospect of a high-risk war by communist China against Taiwan in 2024 rose substantially on May 30, even though all military-political metrics argue against the chances of success for Beijing in such a conflict.
The risk of other military adventurism also increased globally on that date because of the linkage of opportunistic strategic moves of many governments during a U.S. presidential election year. U.S. preoccupation with domestic politics dramatically escalated with a New York legal judgment against presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on May 30.
Relative U.S. strategic paralysis, or distorted decision-making, is a historical feature of U.S. presidential election years, and 2024’s election campaigning has reached levels of vitriol and intensity that have essentially “broken the mold.” There are questions as to how the United States can recover its strategic trajectory, even after the Nov. 5 election, quite apart from the fact that other national governments have been given free rein from U.S. influence for the year.
The risk of major, destabilizing international conflict or power projections in the remaining months of 2024—particularly in East Asia and related to the Russia–Ukraine conflict—was given far greater probability as the result of the fact that a jury in New York convicted President Trump on criminal charges, in the run-up to the presidential election that he’s contesting.
Of primary importance, the China–Taiwan conflict potential and the possibility of otherwise irrational interventions by a number of additional states in the Russia–Ukraine war rose substantially as the United States was plunged into a new and intense level of domestic political polarization.
It’s immaterial that there’s a strong prospect that the Trump conviction and other politically generated charges against the former president could be overturned on appeal or come to nothing. Indeed, the politicization of the U.S. legal system may, in fact, add to the groundswell of support for President Trump. As a result, the U.S. polity is now polarized to a degree not seen since the American Civil War erupted in 1861. It could be worse even than that landmark event, which occurred at a time before the United States was a major component of the global strategic architecture and before electronic social media could rapidly generate mass hysteria.
In the meantime, external perceptions of the United States as a model of leadership and democracy have continued a precipitous decline.
Over the past century, U.S. presidential election years—every four years—have become years when other nations would traditionally seize the opportunity of U.S. political distraction to undertake strategic initiatives, which, in normal years, would attract a predictable U.S. interference or response.
Those presidential election years, which exhibit particularly intense internal political debate in the United States, guarantee the greatest U.S. leadership and media distraction from world events but can also mean that a disproportionate, distorted, or created U.S. response to an international provocation could occur simply because it distracts from a fragile domestic political situation. As former U.S. CIA officer Miles Copeland (1916–1991) noted, “U.S. foreign policy is just U.S. politics carried out abroad.”
And the United States has not, in its history as an independent federation, seen such a year as 2024 for nationally polarizing politics. Moreover, U.S. prestige and, therefore, its overriding coercive influence on the world stage has possibly never been lower than we see today—a factor that has already encouraged a new wave of adventurism by many players around the world. The recent spurt of military coups in Africa, for example, has directly correlated to the declining U.S. (and other great powers) influence levels in the past few years.
More significantly, China’s communist regime has, in 2024, despite its worst economic crisis since the Mao Zedong years, undertaken a global diplomatic initiative to sustain the myth that it’s still a “rising power.”
Beijing is actively working to control global perceptions of it, while Washington is unable to control external perceptions of the United States.
Apart from the array of potential opportunistic actions that could occur around the world, the United States itself must consider how close it has become to a social breakdown into chaos and possible new civil war, even if that “new civil war”—like the concept of “total war” itself—has taken on new, mostly non-military formats. Few, if any, serious U.S. analysts consider a violent U.S. domestic breakdown imminent, but few were prepared for the breakdown between the Northern and Southern states in 1860.
Despite the degree of a possible U.S. domestic breakdown—whether merely political or more physical—the reality is that the United States has perhaps never before had such an incoherent approach to strategic policy and such a protracted record of consistent strategic failures as has been seen in recent years.
The domestic ramifications of the lawfare using New York law against President Trump in recent years (and there have been legal attacks on him in other states) has been the flight of capital from both New York City and New York state to other parts of the United States, and possibly abroad. Significantly, major New York financial corporations have begun moving to Florida, where “Wall Street South” has been growing in new financial district buildings in West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. While the United States may continue to be a major financial power throughout the foreseeable crises, New York City itself may gradually decline as a global financial center.
The insecurity of investments in New York state and New York City, highlighted by the state’s legal attacks on President Trump, quite apart from the onerous tax rates on business, also contribute to the decline of New York’s viability and appeal as a haven for investors. There is an outflow of capital and capitalists from Manhattan as the city becomes increasingly run-down and crime-ridden.
It’s little wonder that the prestige of the United States is diminishing daily.
It’s important to note that the United States didn’t reach this situation overnight.
The great seeds of the U.S. political polarization began after World War II with the rapid urbanization of the population, which achieved its tipping point in the 1990s. But during the Cold War, which lasted until 1990, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s International Section (IS, the former Comintern) had been waging a war to undermine the relative solidarity of U.S. political thought.
The Soviets began a process in their penetration of the U.S. sociopolitical and education systems, which actually saw success after the collapse of the USSR in 1990–1991. It wasn’t just based on the Soviet psychological operations under Boris Nikolayevich Ponamarev (head of the CPSU’s IS and chief of psychological warfare) but also on the confluence of other factors—common throughout the West—of massive urbanization rates for populations, decreasing family size, and increasing apparent wealth.
A contributing writer to The Washington Post, Brian P. Walsh, noted the trend in the May 30 edition, saying: “The radical young scholars of the 1970s and ’80s are now the tenured elders, teaching rising scholars that political posture matters more than accurate analysis. Increasingly, historians view their work as activism, and many disdain the very idea of objective truth as dangerously naïve, if not downright pernicious.
“But if we are to maintain our relevance, historians must once again embrace the idea that we are responsible first and foremost for the facts and the conclusions we draw from them. Truth is not a chimera, and its pursuit is a moral imperative.”
The result is that even if there was a widespread awareness that U.S. presidential election “fever” disrupted global strategic events every four years—and the 2024 fever in the United States is as hot as could be imagined—it’s unlikely that political cliques in the United States would put aside their short-term domestic warfare to seize or retain control of power in order to guard against the emergence of larger and possible more durable worldwide threats to U.S. and Allied interests.
The tinder has already been lit.
