After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin issued a bizarre one-sentence statement: “A nuclear war cannot be won and a nuclear war should never be fought.”
No one would disagree, even if multiple officials from both hypocritical governments had previously threatened neighboring countries with nuclear attacks.
But still, why did the pair feel the need to issue such a brief statement, and why now?
With existential wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, global rhetoric about mass extermination has rarely reached a higher fever pitch.
In particular, Putin at least believes he is finally winning the Ukraine conflict, and Xi Jinping appears to believe that China’s rising conventional military power in the South China Sea has finally made annexing Taiwan within reach.
Both countries believe the only obstacle to victory is intervention by the United States and its NATO allies, and that any conflict could escalate to mutual threats of using nuclear weapons.
This is the latest warning from Xi Jinping and Putin.
Nearly every month, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues to make tired threats to use nuclear weapons to destroy South Korea and Japan.
The equally monotone, pro-Hamas Turkish President Recep Erdogan regularly threatens Armenians with crazy rhetoric about repeating “the mission of our grandfathers,” and occasionally warns Israelis and Greeks that they may one day find Turkish missiles raining down on their cities.
More specifically, Iran attacked Israeli soil for the first time in history, and launched the largest wartime cruise missile, ballistic missile and drone attack in modern history, totaling more than 320 projectiles.
At the same time, Iranian theocracies claim that they are nearly ready to build nuclear weapons.And, of course, since 1979, Iran has periodically promised to wipe Israel off the map, and with it half the world’s Jews.
Most people ignore these insane threats, dismissing them as dictatorial boasting, but human barbarism has not changed much since the pre-modern world, as evidenced by the brutal beheadings, amputations, murders, gang rapes, torture and hostage taking of Israeli old men, women and children on October 7.
But what has fundamentally changed are the means of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, chemical gases, biological weapons, and artificial intelligence.
Curiously, the world’s reaction to predictions of Armageddon remains one of indifference, with most feeling that such strongmen will yell loudly but never unleash civilization-destroying weapons.
Consider that there are as many authoritarian nuclear powers (Russia, China, Pakistan, North Korea, and perhaps Iran) as there are democracies (US, UK, France, Israel, India). Only Israel has an effective ballistic missile defense dome. And the more the power of the Western conventional arsenals declines, the more they will have to rely on nuclear deterrence in extreme circumstances, even though they have no effective missile defense against themselves.
In my recently published book, The End of Everything, I write about four examples of extinction where the unthinkable became reality: the ancient city-state of Thebes, ancient Carthage, the Byzantine Empire’s Constantinople, and the Aztec Empire of Tenochtitlan.
In all these erasures, the naive targeted nations believed that their glorious past would guarantee their survival, rather than realistically assessing their current inadequate defenses.
Everyone hoped that their allies – the Spartans, the anti-Roman Macedonians, the Christian countries of Western Europe, and the Aztec vassal cities – would emerge at the last minute to stave off defeat.
Moreover, these targeted nations had little understanding of the plans and capabilities of the highly deliberate killers outside their walls: the ruthless aspiring philosopher Alexander the Great, the patron of literature Scipio Aemilianus, the self-proclaimed intellectual Mehmed II, and the bookworm Hernán Cortés, all of whom sought not simply to defeat their enemies but to completely destroy them.
These fallen cities and nations were destroyed or absorbed by their conquerors. Their inhabitants were exterminated or enslaved, and their once sacred cultures, customs and traditions were lost to history. The last words of the conquered peoples were often, “It doesn’t happen here.”
If the past is any guide to the present, we should be mindful that things that rarely happen in war can certainly happen.
Even when a murderer makes a crazy threat, we should take it seriously.
We should not depend on friends or neutrals to save our civilization: instead, Americans should build a defense system over our homeland, secure our borders, ensure that our military is run by meritocracy, end reckless deficit spending and borrowing, and rebuild both our conventional and nuclear forces.
Otherwise, we will naively and fatally believe that we are magically exempt when the unthinkable becomes all too real.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of “World War II: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” published by Basic Books. To contact him, please email: Author vdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
