How Russia and China Could Strike the U.S. Air Force’s ‘Achilles Heel’
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The most any one of these powers will do (and all of them do it) is trying to subvert and destroy weak governments that are friendly to the adversary.
There's not even a chance that one power might try to pit the two others against each other (I'm talking about a real war) because all of them are guaranteed to wipe out all of the others if the survival of their own state is sufficiently threatened.
The reasoning for this goes something like this: If we are destroyed and only one superpower survives this (because they didn't take part in it) they'd be in a position to dominate all of what remains. Very cynical but that's how MAD works.
Even Israel which is much weaker than any of those three has a similar deterrence strategy. It entails striking the West, even if they were overrun by Arabs, not Western powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
I don't like how this all works (I'm not a Sociopath) but it seems to have been very effective over the last decades because the actors were all rational.
The reason why Muslim countries acquiring WMD's is so much more heavily opposed is that many strategists do believe that their ideology could threaten MAD. It is not inconceivable that some of these governments could launch an all out attack if they had the capability believing that they will all go to heaven for taking out what they perceive to be "the great Satan".
This depends on whether or not you believe the ideology can travel past the level of technological sophistication necessary to deploy nukes. The ideology itself is pretty self-abnegating - it has many marques of a suicide cult.
This being said, there was this weekend ( from Aug 18th, 2016 ) a repeat of Douglas Cohn's "WW4", in which one nightmare scenario is ISIS "invading" Pakistan and becoming nuke-capable.
I imagine that'd get our collective attention if it looked like it was forming. I hope somebody is paying attention...
Cohn also notes that, at least in the offensive role, one division of American troops could dissipate ISIS in short order. After the offensive comes the "you broke it, you bought it" part, which is why we don't just.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
Note how the government of Pakistan responds to these allegations that the US has these plans by reassuring everyone that the weapons are safe instead of being outraged that a foreign government disregards their sovereignty in such a way. That says a lot.
> This depends on whether or not you believe the ideology can travel past the level of technological sophistication necessary to deploy nukes. The ideology itself is pretty self-abnegating - it has many marques of a suicide cult.
Well ISIS is quite comfortable with using the latest technologies for their purposes and countries like Iran have a truly remarkable scientific community (considering their isolation), so I tend to believe that ideology alone will not inhibit them sufficiently to not being able to achieve this goal if they really want to.
Edit: Yes I agree, the US could take out ISIS in a few weeks, so could Russia. What is missing is the will as there are serious repercussions if you try to do it while other superpowers oppose it vigorously. (and on top of that you'd have to use very blunt force in order to do it - many civilians on ISIS held territory would die)
That's why I believe that Trump as a president would make it happen as he has stated on multiple occasions that he would do it together with Putin in some way.
If the US and Russia / China shared a common goal here they would destroy ISIS very quickly.
Iran is a... bicameral society with, as you say, a high degree of sophistication coeexisting with fundamentalism. As the sting of 1953 fades, I can't help but think we'll eventually achieve normal relations with them. I don't, for example, see as much screaming about the Obama Administrations attempts to thaw things out by the Rightist press as I used to. It's not a stretch for present-day Americans to denounce Dulles-brothers style adventurism.
This being said, I think of ISIS itself as an international attractor for disaffected youth, with an apparently explicit emphasis on martyrdom.
And yes - I expect we'll keep a very close watch on Pakistan. I just meant that if Pakistan were to fall, it wouldn't be a huge military effort to ... secure it. It would be a big logistical effort but I think of Gulf War I as the model. Of course, then we'd stiffen the resolve of those who oppose Westerners being there at all. I am also sure that we'd try to use the fig leaf of the U.N.
If Russia and China have these capabilities today, then opponents we DO engage will have them tomorrow... unless, you know, someone fixes the problem.
Not to say that we have nuclear assurances against a direct conflict between the US and Russia, we don't have such assurances for US proxies engaging Russian or Chinese proxies. The US needs to have enough conventional deterrence to prevent major proxy wars - which, by the way, destabilize the world economy and make the world a crappier place for everyone, including the "third-world-lives-don't-matter" isolationists such as yourself.
But they won't. MAD is alive and well, no matter how insane it is.