風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
大國回歸 俄羅斯、中國和下一場世界大戰
https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China/dp/0593474139
作者：Jim Sciutto (Author) 2024 年 3 月 12 日
“這是一本引人入勝的 21 世紀邊緣政策記述……每一位立法者或總統候選人都應該讀一讀，他們被誤導認為讓美國回到孤立主義的過去或與普京交好是當今世界的可行選擇。”——《紐約時報書評》
CNN 主播兼首席國家安全分析師 Jim Sciutto 的新書必不可少，他通過報道權力前線（從現有的戰爭到全球迫在眉睫的戰爭）確定了一個新的、更不確定的全球秩序。
1989 年柏林牆的倒塌開啟了弗朗西斯·福山所說的“曆史的終結”。三十年後，烏克蘭戰爭爆發時，吉姆·斯庫托在 CNN 節目中表示，我們正處於“1939 年時刻”。曆史從未終結——它幾乎沒有停頓——我們長期以來所熟知的全球秩序現已不複存在。強國決心在世界舞台上確立主導地位。隨著它們對權力的爭奪不斷升級，新的秩序將影響全球所有人。俄羅斯入侵烏克蘭是其中的一部分，但實際上，這場權力鬥爭影響著我們世界的每一個角落——從赫爾辛基到北京，從澳大利亞到北極。這是一場多線作戰：在北極、在海洋和天空、在人工島嶼和重新繪製的地圖上，以及在技術和網絡空間。
通過對數十位政治、軍事和情報領導人進行全球獨家采訪，斯庫托將我們的時代定義為大國衝突的回歸，“後冷戰時代與一個全新且不確定的時代的明確決裂”。他以敏銳、透徹、親臨現場的報道，延續了 2019 年暢銷書《影子戰爭：揭秘俄羅斯和中國擊敗美國的秘密行動》，該書重點關注隱藏衝突的秘密戰術。
《大國回歸》分析了曆史性的、可見的實時轉變。它詳細描述了這個新的後冷戰時代的現實、俄羅斯和中國政府日益結盟，以及新的全球核軍備競賽的爆發點。它提出了一個問題：當我們考慮不確定甚至可怕的結果時，西方、俄羅斯和中國是否有可能阻止一場新的世界大戰？
評論《大國回歸：俄羅斯、中國和下一場世界大戰》
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/return-great-powers-russia-china-and-next-world-war
作者：Jim Sciutto
評論者：Lawrence D. Freedman
2024 年 9 月/10 月
發布於 2024 年 8 月 20 日
CNN 首席國家安全記者 Sciutto 描述了俄羅斯對烏克蘭的戰爭以及中國對台灣的威脅，暗示莫斯科的成功可能會鼓舞北京。該分析並不是特別新穎，因為它來自對高級決策者和軍方人物的采訪，因此反映了他們的擔憂。它的價值在於讓人們了解有影響力的人物如何看待關鍵事件的展開，不僅在美國，而且在其他受影響的國家。例如，閱讀台灣對中國威脅的看法以及台灣打算如何應對這一威脅是很有用的。修托的分析主要涉及試圖辨別中國國家主席習近平的意圖，以及俄羅斯總統弗拉基米爾·普京的意圖，這一點從他對俄羅斯在烏克蘭戰爭中使用核武器的可能性的長篇討論中可以看出。不過，正如修托所表明的那樣，試圖了解美國前總統唐納德·特朗普的想法並從他的過往經曆中得出結論也會導致困惑和焦慮。
書評：我們距離下一次世界大戰有多遠
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
