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大国回归 俄罗斯、中国和下一场世界大战
https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China/dp/0593474139
作者：Jim Sciutto (Author) 2024 年 3 月 12 日
“这是一本引人入胜的 21 世纪边缘政策记述……每一位立法者或总统候选人都应该读一读，他们被误导认为让美国回到孤立主义的过去或与普京交好是当今世界的可行选择。”——《纽约时报书评》
CNN 主播兼首席国家安全分析师 Jim Sciutto 的新书必不可少，他通过报道权力前线（从现有的战争到全球迫在眉睫的战争）确定了一个新的、更不确定的全球秩序。
1989 年柏林墙的倒塌开启了弗朗西斯·福山所说的“历史的终结”。三十年后，乌克兰战争爆发时，吉姆·斯库托在 CNN 节目中表示，我们正处于“1939 年时刻”。历史从未终结——它几乎没有停顿——我们长期以来所熟知的全球秩序现已不复存在。强国决心在世界舞台上确立主导地位。随着它们对权力的争夺不断升级，新的秩序将影响全球所有人。俄罗斯入侵乌克兰是其中的一部分，但实际上，这场权力斗争影响着我们世界的每一个角落——从赫尔辛基到北京，从澳大利亚到北极。这是一场多线作战：在北极、在海洋和天空、在人工岛屿和重新绘制的地图上，以及在技术和网络空间。
通过对数十位政治、军事和情报领导人进行全球独家采访，斯库托将我们的时代定义为大国冲突的回归，“后冷战时代与一个全新且不确定的时代的明确决裂”。他以敏锐、透彻、亲临现场的报道，延续了 2019 年畅销书《影子战争：揭秘俄罗斯和中国击败美国的秘密行动》，该书重点关注隐藏冲突的秘密战术。
《大国回归》分析了历史性的、可见的实时转变。它详细描述了这个新的后冷战时代的现实、俄罗斯和中国政府日益结盟，以及新的全球核军备竞赛的爆发点。它提出了一个问题：当我们考虑不确定甚至可怕的结果时，西方、俄罗斯和中国是否有可能阻止一场新的世界大战？
评论《大国回归：俄罗斯、中国和下一场世界大战》
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/return-great-powers-russia-china-and-next-world-war
作者：Jim Sciutto
评论者：Lawrence D. Freedman
2024 年 9 月/10 月
发布于 2024 年 8 月 20 日
CNN 首席国家安全记者 Sciutto 描述了俄罗斯对乌克兰的战争以及中国对台湾的威胁，暗示莫斯科的成功可能会鼓舞北京。该分析并不是特别新颖，因为它来自对高级决策者和军方人物的采访，因此反映了他们的担忧。它的价值在于让人们了解有影响力的人物如何看待关键事件的展开，不仅在美国，而且在其他受影响的国家。例如，阅读台湾对中国威胁的看法以及台湾打算如何应对这一威胁是很有用的。修托的分析主要涉及试图辨别中国国家主席习近平的意图，以及俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京的意图，这一点从他对俄罗斯在乌克兰战争中使用核武器的可能性的长篇讨论中可以看出。不过，正如修托所表明的那样，试图了解美国前总统唐纳德·特朗普的想法并从他的过往经历中得出结论也会导致困惑和焦虑。
书评：我们距离下一次世界大战有多远
The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War
https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China/dp/0593474139
by Jim Sciutto (Author) March 12 2024
“An absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship . . . . one that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.” –New York Times Book Review
The essential new book by CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto, identifying a new, more uncertain global order with reporting on the frontlines of power from existing wars to looming ones across the globe.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, Jim Sciutto said on CNN’s air as the Ukraine war began, that we are living in a “1939 moment.” History never ended—it barely paused—and the global order as we long have known it is now gone. Powerful nations are determined to assert dominance on the world stage. And as their push for power escalates, a new order will affect everyone across the globe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a part of it, but in reality, this power struggle impacts every corner of our world—from Helsinki to Beijing, from Australia to the North Pole. This is a battle with many fronts: in the Arctic, in the oceans and across the skies, on man-made islands and redrawn maps, and in tech and cyberspace.
Through globe-spanning, exclusive interviews with dozens of political, military, and intelligence leaders, Sciutto defines our times as a return of great power conflict, “a definitive break between the post–Cold War era and an entirely new and uncertain one.” With savvy, thorough, in-person reporting, he follows-up his 2019 bestseller, The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America, which focused on the covert tactics of a hidden conflict.
The Return of Great Powers analyzes a historic and visible shift in real time. It details the realities of this new post–post–Cold War era, the increasingly aligned Russian and Chinese governments, and the flashpoint of a new, global nuclear arms race. And it poses a question: As we consider uncertain, even terrifying, outcomes, will it be possible for the West and Russia and China to prevent a new World War?
Review The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/return-great-powers-russia-china-and-next-world-war
By Jim Sciutto
Reviewed by Lawrence D. Freedman
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, describes Russia’s war against Ukraine and China’s threats toward Taiwan, suggesting that Moscow’s success could embolden Beijing. The analysis is not particularly original, as it is drawn from interviews with senior policymakers and military figures and so reflects their concerns. Its value lies in providing a sense of how influential people viewed key events as they unfolded, not just in the United States but also in other affected countries. It is useful, for example, to read Taiwanese views of the Chinese threat and how the island proposes to meet it. Much of Sciutto’s analysis involves trying to discern the intentions of Chinese President Xi Jinping and, as demonstrated by a long discussion of the possibility of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine, those of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then again, as Sciutto shows, attempts to read former U.S. President Donald Trump’s mind and draw conclusions from his track record can also lead to confusion and anxiety.
What's the Quickest Path to World War III?
In “The Return of Great Powers” and "Up in Arms,” Jim Sciutto and Adam E. Casey consider modern-day superpower conflict through the lens of the past.
John Bolton, right, and President Trump in the White House on April 9, 2018.Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press
By Scott Anderson April 2, 2024
Scott Anderson’s most recent book is “The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — A Tragedy in Three Acts.”
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War, by Jim Sciutto
UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats, by Adam E. Casey
Every few months in the years that Donald J. Trump was president, Iran made a show of its ballistic missiles — the powerful rockets that can deliver nuclear warheads from one nation to another — and set off a small panic in Washington. The tests went like this: A missile flew up from one part of Iran, traveled through the country’s airspace and, ideally, blew up harmlessly in another part of Iran, hundreds of miles away.
The former White House political adviser John Kelly remembers that, on one such occasion, after intelligence of an impending missile launch came in, Trump said he wanted to shoot the weapon down. “Well, sir, that’s an act of war,” Kelly recalls telling him. “You really need to go over to Congress and get at least an authorization.”
“They’ll never go along with it,” Trump apparently replied.
“Well, I know,” Kelly said. “But that’s our system.”
This anecdote and many other alarming scenes appear in Jim Sciutto’s “The Return of Great Powers,” an absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship. Sciutto has interviewed several of Trump’s former advisers, including Kelly, who explains that he managed to talk his old boss out of some of his worst ideas only by suggesting they would hurt his standing in public opinion. “Americans, generally speaking by polling, think that we should be involved in the world,” he recalls telling Trump when the president threatened to pull the United States out of NATO.
The former national security adviser John Bolton is even more blunt about this episode. “Honest to God,” Bolton says, “it was frightening because we didn’t know what he was going to do up until the last minute.”
That such political figures would speak so candidly can be partly credited to Sciutto’s standing as CNN’s chief national security analyst and his earlier stint with the State Department under Barack Obama. He’s the kind of well-connected reporter who, as we learn in this book, gets a call at 3 a.m., in February 2022, from an unnamed Congress member to warn him that a war in Ukraine is imminent.
It also reflects the unbridled horror that insiders like Kelly and Bolton feel at the prospect of a second Trump administration taking charge amid a perilous superpower chess game. “The Return of Great Powers” argues that we are living through a Cold War redux that once again pits the United States against Russia and China. The battle is being waged on every imaginable front, from undersea communication cables to satellites in outer space and the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.
Sciutto begins with cinematic jumps between an eclectic assortment of personalities — American generals and congressional leaders, Finnish diplomats and Taiwanese naval captains — in the days and hours leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In later sections, the white-knuckle tension he experiences as Russian warplanes close in on a NATO fleet conducting exercises near the Baltic Sea is eerily echoed by Chinese jets operating in the Taiwan Strait.
Add to this precarity those proxy mischief-makers — North Korea, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to name a few — that might see advantage in provoking a superpower showdown. It’s enough to send those with a front-row view into the old basement bomb shelter.
Or to cause them to share their fears with a reputable journalist. Virtually all of Sciutto’s interlocutors are aligned: A defeated Ukraine will embolden Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to attack one of the other countries, perhaps Estonia or Moldova, that have already caught his covetous eye. It might also encourage an impatient Xi Jinping of China to force a military solution to “the Taiwan question,” an event that some observers see as a precursor to global war.
Having identified the peril, Sciutto’s panelists also agree on the solutions: unwavering commitment to the defense of Ukraine; greater integration of NATO forces; much closer cooperation between the European and Asian blocs of democratic nations. Ironically, many of these recommendations are now being enacted thanks to the Russian invasion and Chinese encroachments — long-neutral Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and East Asian nations have strengthened their mutual defense pacts.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for concern. Trump, once again his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has fought against U.S. military aid to Ukraine and urged Russia “to do whatever the hell” it wants to NATO members who fail to meet their financial obligations. The litany of international dangers Sciutto describes, set alongside the recollections of some of Trump’s closest former advisers, is the stuff of unholy nightmares.
For all its strengths, “The Return of Great Powers” sometimes displays a peculiar awkwardness in conveying others’ views. Sciutto can let his subjects meander around points that are not particularly interesting or original — or, at times, even comprehensible. On the matter of standing up to Russia, for example, he quotes a senior Western diplomat as stating: “The idea that we can’t do this is completely false, but the problem is also economically and physically we have that capability. But then, do we have it politically? It’s going to be a different game. But am I concerned? Yes.”
I suppose I’d be concerned, too, if only I could grasp what he’s talking about. Still, these are mere quibbles when set against the import of Sciutto’s book, one that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.
The ideal way forward for a great power like the United States has always been fraught, and looking back at the mistakes and successes of the Cold War is often instructive, but not always. Adam E. Casey’s “Up in Arms” is well written and clearly the product of prodigious research; it also shows how Cold War comparisons can sometimes go too far.
Casey, a former academic who is now a national security analyst for a curiously unspecified branch of the U.S. government, sets out to re-examine the accepted wisdom that U.S. aid to totalitarian regimes served to maintain and prolong those dictatorships during the latter half of the 20th century. In rebutting this thesis, he sets out some statistics that are initially eye-catching. According to his examination of hundreds of Cold War authoritarian regimes, Soviet-supported rulers survived, on average, twice as long as American-supported ones. Most startling, in any given year, U.S.-backed dictators were about seven times more likely to fall than their Soviet counterparts.
As he points out, though, the Soviets exported their own military model to client states, which meant an armed forces thoroughly infiltrated by Communist Party commissars, and counterintelligence officers whose primary focus was keeping watch over the ideological steadfastness of their own rank and file. The result was an army wholly subordinate to the party and the state, drastically reducing the odds of a military coup.
By contrast, the U.S.-military model called for building out an anti-communist army independent of whatever tyrant happened to be in power at the time, often leading to the creation of a parallel power base that might ultimately challenge said tyrant. The American method was less durable, because it often yielded a round robin of military coups led by anti-communist officers against other anti-communist officers.
Casey gamely suggests his findings might have currency as the planet enters another period of superpower jockeying, but it is hard to see precisely how this military-proxy dynamic of yore replicates itself. China has never shown much interest in extending its martial reach to countries beyond Asia, and Russian military tutelage is surely trading at a deep discount after its dismal Ukrainian outing.
As for the United States, while displaying little reservation about cozying up to despots when convenient — witness some of the grotesqueries it has climbed into bed with for the so-called “war on terror” — it’s hard to imagine any eagerness to go back to the days of army-building in the wake of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan war hangovers.
That being said, the last Cold War went on for decades. In 10 or 20 years, the hangovers could fade. China’s economic ties to countries like Uganda and Ethiopia, Russia’s support of Cuba and Venezuela and American entanglements in Southeast Asia and the Middle East all have the potential to turn from cold to warm, or from warm to boiling hot. Giving up on democracy is all the rage these days. The leaders of the great powers could start eyeing Cold War-inspired playbooks like Casey’s, with dire results for everyone caught in between.
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War | By Jim Sciutto | Dutton | 353 pp. | $30
UP IN ARMS: How Military Aid Stabilizes — and Destabilizes — Foreign Autocrats | By Adam E. Casey | Basic Books | 323 pp. | $32
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline
