It is common that many geo-powers that were determined by history, like those that were empowered in the Second World War, to have always been eager to continue maintaining their geo-advantages. Such a view is born out of the many long-term confrontations experienced by the world. While the world is largely at peace now, such geo-powers often still want to maintain a certain degree of power and form a controllable position. This is the significance of the world's balance of power. Objectively speaking, after the Second World War, what the global geostrategy sought for was the world's balance of power. Hence, the balance of power has become the mainstream theory of geostrategy. Countless doctoral candidates in various countries have been trained in such a theory. What was unexpected however is that, 74 years after the end of the Second World War, when the world has truly achieved the balance of power, an uncontrollable anxiety seems to be manifesting itself. Given that each party have almost equal strengths, no one wants to be dominated by another. Then, who would assume the role of being the geo-leader in this world?
Our world is currently seeing a balance of power that has never happened before. Nuclear weapons have now become universal. In addition to the older nuclear powers like the United States, Russia, Britain and France, there are countries such as India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, South Africa and Iran that possess, or are suspected of possessing nuclear weapons. Most continents in the world, with the exception for South American countries, have nuclear weapons ready for deployment, forming a balanced situation of nuclear confrontation.
The same is true of the conventional balance of power. The U.S. military, despite readily equipped with modern weapons, is still unable to beat the Arab guerrillas, as seen in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan. The military power of the economically superior developed countries is still unable to completely defeat the economically declining Russia in many parts of the world. Putin's Russia has successfully developed a tactic of utilizing geo-guerrillas. The shadows of Russia will appear wherever there is chaos. Israel also serves as an example of this. Although the Israelis have a huge amount of conventional modern weapons and equipment in dealing with the situation in the Middle East, they are also struggling to cope with threats from Iran and Lebanon. Coupled with the intervention of Turkey, a new balance of power which lacks a dominant force has already been gradually forming in the Middle East. This is a kind of imbalanced equilibrium that has never been seen before. Modern military equipment also cannot exert their function, and it is difficult for one party to defeat another completely.
It is worth noting that China is also a powerful force in the world, and its speed of modernizing its conventional military equipment is quite astonishing as well. In the current world, due to the generalization of information technology, conventional military equipment technology is also becoming more common at an unprecedented speed. With effective strategies, the conventional military equipment has caused various countries to form a relative balance of power, making countries rely on the advantages of conventional military equipment in geo-hotspots to experiencing a significant decline of status. This brings about anxieties that the future world will be a world without a dominant power.
Based on this realistic scenario, it is possible to have a clear forecast of the patterns of future wars and conflicts. The main conclusion is that if the conventional wars in the world's major strategic hotspots are not successfully ended, and no clearly visible outcomes appear, then the future world will enter an era of nuclear war.
Conventional wars that have been successfully concluded and have clear outcomes of victory will be vital in the new geopolitical history. They can prove that conventional warfare is still a reliable means to defeat the enemy, and they are also an indication that the conventional strategy and tactics can still play a major role in resolving geopolitical conflicts. Geo-strategic hotspots that have experienced this type of conventional war include the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea, South Asia that encompasses the Himalayas, Northeast Asia, Ukraine, and the Middle East.
The biggest problem caused by the geo-political balance of the world is that once these outcomes of conventional warfare in geo-hotspots do not prove the effectiveness of the equipment of conventional balance, the world will enter a real era of nuclear war. In the past, nuclear weapons were not used as weapons in actual use, but as strategic deterrents. In the current world, especially where the universalization of nuclear weapons has occurred, the value and role of this deterrence has been greatly reduced. The power of deterrence is also regarded as having almost failed. In addition, nuclear-based strategic deterrence must be effective in conjunction with other relevant geopolitical policies; this is something that is understandable. Countries that can master nuclear weapons in modern times are not necessarily that have the ability to use strategic deterrence. There are doubts about the understanding of power, all of which makes nuclear war more easily triggered.
It is worth noting that modern nuclear war is not necessarily a world-level nuclear war. The success in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons, the increasing controllability of nuclear pollution, and the increasing cost of conventional weapons and equipment are all factors that greatly increase the likelihood of a nuclear war taking place. Judging from the perspective of geopolitics, the locations that are more prone to nuclear war are the sparsely populated areas in the Middle East and the world's oceans. However, no matter where the nuclear war breaks out in the world, it signifies that the world has officially begun to enter the era of nuclear war, which also means that the earth’s self-destruction process has started.
Final analysis conclusion:
The global balance of power is not easy to achieve, but achieving it brings more anxiety and uncertainty about the future to the table. One of the biggest challenges facing politicians in the future will be curbing the urge of army generals to use nuclear weapons. This is a terrible consequence that has not much notice has been placed on after the balance of power strategy was proposed in the 16th century, and it is also a kind of deformed effort that is caused by certain parties trying to maintain their advantages in the balance of power.
