After a year of Trump, crisis lull masks risk of conflict

Bloomberg

After a year of US President Donald Trump, the trans-Atlantic security establishment seems unsure whether to be relieved that a major war hasn’t begun on his watch or alarmed at the scale of emerging risks. Speeches and panel discussions at the Munich Security Conference in Germany over the weekend portrayed a world on the cusp of three potential conflagrations: In the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula and, in years to come, cyberspace.
Add to that a growing concern that arms control agreements that kept the nuclear peace between the US and Russia since the 1980s are at risk of unraveling, and the mood among the annual assembly of political leaders and generals was unusually sober.
“The situation is pretty grim,’’ said Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a regular at the event. “All of the powder which has been accumulated by Trump in the last year is beginning to look very flammable.’’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that his country would change its role as a bystander to the war in Syria if Iran’s military and allied militias were allowed to “colonize’’ that country. “Israel will act not just against Iran’s proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself,” Netanyahu said.
Minutes earlier, a US member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James Risch, said that although the US had no so-called “bloody nose’’ plan for a demonstrative attack on North Korea, conflict “of biblical proportions” was possible, and no one in the hall should delude themselves otherwise.
In an otherwise reassuring speech, US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster defended plans to develop low-yield tactical nuclear missiles as a means to deter Russia, which is developing similar weapons. Both former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel expressed alarm at the implications of such supposedly limited
nuclear weapons for Europe.
“I think there is a question of whether we are at the end of an era of formal arms control,’’ said Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who advised the Pentagon under Ronald Reagan.