The World War II Axis saw our enemies take big risks with little chance of success, to our ultimate advantage. We might eventually see Russia's decision to invade Ukraine three years ago in the same light. China might do that, too. Is this baked in to autocratic leadership?
Interesting point about Axis decision-making:
Each strategic mega-gamble—Hitler’s double-cross of Stalin, Japan’s move against Pearl Harbor—made a certain sense in the mental world Axis leaders inhabited. Taken together, they were a master class in self-harm. No matter how close the Axis came to victory, no matter how impressively their militaries performed, there was something perverse about strategies that risked everything on a mad rush for hegemony—with strategic death as the consequence of failure. And if the decisions were perverse, so were the processes that yielded them.
Regardless of the self-harm German and Japanese decisions unleashed in themselves, a lot of people still suffered and died to defeat the nearly doomed decisions to wage big wars to achieve greatness.
I'm not sure where you put the 1944 Allied D-Day landings in France, which if a failure would have led to an invasion a year or two later. Or perhaps landing in France at Soviet-controlled ports.
But the point is still good. But don't draw comfort from the notion that China would never be so foolish as to roll the dice by going to war with America and its allies. If you are counting on that legendary Chinese long-range thinking, guess again.
Or the Chinese Communist Party might accept a lot of destruction if it sees war as the least bad option open to them:
And don't rule out the possibility that the Chinese Communist party might wreck the state of China to remain dominant in whatever is left--the Soviet communists traded away a lot of Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to end their role in World War I, after all. And that objective of party control, after all, was the point of the Cultural Revolution's decade-long madness, death, and destruction.
The Russians are bleeding out in Ukraine with their three week war reaching three years. That seems like a big gamble that failed.
Iran waged war on Israel through proxies and directly. That's not working out so well.
Hamas went for broke with a rape and murder invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, provoking a destructive counteroffensive.
Al Qaeda committed mass murder within America on September 11, 2001, provoking a counteroffensive that decimated it and left its leader as fish food.
What might North Korea try?
Autocrat rational isn't our rational. They may see a path to victory that we don't see. And who will tell them that they are wrong?
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
