CFR Insists the U.S. Must Prepare for ‘Total War’
Dec. 31—This Christmas season, the Editor of Foreign Affairs Dan Kurtz-Phelan, sent out an email on Dec. 20 with the startling subject line: “The Return of Total War.” That was the title of an article published in Foreign Affairs the year before, on Oct. 24, 2024, which the editor urged everyone to read again. Foreign Affairs is the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which was set up in 1921 as a “sister think tank” to the British Monarchy’s Chatham House/Royal Institute of International Affairs—these being the same oligarchs whipping Europe into a war frenzy today.
The promoted article was subtitled “Understanding—and Preparing for—a New Era of Comprehensive Conflict.” Its author Mara Karlin was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities in the Biden administration, who oversaw the development and implementation of the hair-raising 2022 National Defense Strategy, a document which led EIR to ask at the time: Who’s Playing Nuclear Chicken, and Why?
That 2024 Biden policy still applies, Foreign Affairs Editor Kurtz-Phelan proclaimed. “Total war is back. Indeed, there are signs everywhere that countries are preparing for all-out conflicts. Just this week, the Trump administration asked Congress to approve the largest-ever U.S. arms package for Taiwan, and the head of the British military said the United Kingdom needs more people ‘ready to fight,’ given threats from Russia.” Karlin’s advice for Washington “is persuasive, if counterintuitive,” he wrote; “the best way to avoid a total war is gearing up to fight one.”
A source close to the White House said that the assertion that the Biden policy remained in place "is the wishful thinking of a bankrupt policy elite." The source said that while there are people in the current administration that cling to this outdated view, the White House and President Donald Trump reject it, as, the source said, was made clear in the newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) document, which rejects the military confrontationist outlook which led the Biden Administration to provoke NATO's war against Russia in Ukraine, which it has hopelessly lost.
Karlin’s premise is that war is man’s natural condition. “Every age had its own kind of war,” she wrote at the outset, citing Carl von Clausewitz. War is different today than during the post-9/11“war on terror,” whose wars—which destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.—she dismisses as “highly circumscribed … often limited in scale and waged in remote locations.”
Now, the “era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun. Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called ‘total war,’ in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries.”
The gist of Karlin’s argument is that the U.S. needs to scale up what it did to support for Ukraine and Israel’s genocide, in order to now “deter its main rival”: China.
Washington demonstrated in Ukraine “that it can build a foreign military with alacrity,” she wrote. Likewise, “lessons from the rapid delivery of assistance to Ukraine have also been applied to the Israel-Hamas war”; “U.S.-supplied air defense capabilities and munitions” were shipped to Israel “in days.”
Taiwan is to be the new “Ukraine.” The “lessons from Ukraine have informed the Biden administration’s turbocharged effort to strengthen Taiwan,” she baldly admitted. U.S. strategy must be to reorganize and train Taiwan’s military, build up “allied” coalitions and groupings (AUKUS, Quad, etc.), and disperse U.S. military forces on “more bases in more places” across the Indo-Pacific.