Named a Most-Anticipated Title by Foreign Policy and Politico
"In The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War, Mr. Sciutto depicts a world made more dangerous by Chinese and Russian expansionism. Drawing on his experience as CNN¡¯s chief national-security correspondent, Mr. Sciutto has written an eye-witness account of history as it unfolds." ¡ªWall Street Journal
"Sciutto takes no pleasure in playing Cassandra, warning of a world that for all its 21st-century sophistication and irony is backsliding towards Greek tragedy." ¡ªThe Guardian
¡°A powerful and well-written warning to us all.¡± ¡ªThe Cipher Brief
"The Return of Great Powers is a brilliant warning shot across the world's bow. If we want to avoid a new world war, our leaders are going to have to pull the blinkers from their eyes -- and this superb book can help shatter our complaisance. Jim Sciutto is saying, quite clearly, ¡®Wake up, folks. A world war could easily happen.¡¯ It is a warning worth heeding.¡± ¡ªAdmiral James Stavridis, 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and Vice Chairman for Global Affairs at The Carlyle Group. His latest book is 2054: A Novel, about AI, geopolitics, and civil conflict in America.
¡°Jim¡¯s prior book, Shadow War, opened my eyes to the difficulty in addressing Russia and China in a ¡®below the traditional threshold¡¯ worldwide battle for the future. The Return of Great Powers is a sobering but necessary look at the future of warfare, influence, and competition. If the US wants to remain competitive, and do so in an environment of peace, leaders would do themselves a service to read this and understand the future challenges. They aren¡¯t going away, and the US cannot pretend the future isn¡¯t close. It comes before we know it, and we¡¯ll either be prepared or we won¡¯t. Jim clearly understand that preparedness and sober assessment is the best way to avoid conflict, and leave our children better off than we are.¡± ¡ªAdam Kinzinger, Former US Representative (Illinois)
Chapter Page
Preface xi
Prologue: The Gathering Storm 3
Chapter 1 Great Power Warfare 21
Chapter 2 Dividing Lines 55
Chapter 3 Flashpoint Baltic Sea 99
Chapter 4 Russia's Next Targets 125
Chapter 5 Target Taiwan 147
Chapter 6 Taiwan's Existential Questions 169
Chapter 7 "No Longer Unthinkable" 197
Chapter 8 A Multifront War 225
Chapter 9 Trump Wild Card 256
Chapter 10 Paths to Peace 276
Epilogue: The Long War 316
Acknowledgments 325
Notes 329
Index 339
CHAPTER ONE
GREAT POWER WARFARE
3:00 A.M. PHONE CALL
Close to 3:00 a.m., on Monday, February 21, 2022, a member of Congress I know well woke me up in Kyiv with a call from Washington and a question. "Has the State Department or White House warned you guys at all about what's coming in Kyiv?" he asked me. I knew that Russia had surrounded Ukraine with a massive force and was in the final stages of preparations for an invasion-and I knew that I was then lying in a bed in a hotel at the center of Russia's prime target. But I wondered if I was missing something. Was the attack going to be even larger than feared? So I pressed him: "Warned us about what specifically?"
"For the hell Putin is going to unleash on the capital," he said. "Are your people aware? Are you ready?"
By then, CNN and several other US and European networks had stationed our teams at the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Kyiv. It was an ideal though precarious location for witnessing the launch of a modern war. Situated on the eastern edge of the capital, where the city is perched on high ground over the Dnipro River, the hotel provides clear views of the eastern and northern approaches to Kyiv-the most likely paths of a Russian invasion. But the hotel was also right across the street from not one but two juicy targets for Russian air and missile strikes: the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the headquarters of the national police. News agencies, including CNN, had made sure to communicate the location of their staffs to the Russian authorities. But as a very good friend of mine in the Pentagon had warned me a few days earlier, "The Russians don't have very good aim."
Now wide-awake, I thanked the congressman and called one of my bosses in the US to share the congressman's warning. "Had we had any communication with Biden administration officials about a particular threat to this location?" I asked him. By then, I had a pretty good idea of what the first wave of the invasion would look like. According to US intelligence assessments, Russia planned a "shock-and-awe" barrage of missile and air strikes on the Ukrainian capital, modeled to some degree on the shock-and-awe campaign that had prefaced the US invasion of Iraq, nearly nineteen years earlier. On March 20, 2003, as the US assault on the Iraqi capital began, I'd been sitting at a Romanian airfield, surrounded by a battalion of US Green Berets, ready to board a night flight into Iraq. The accounts we heard over the radio were awe-inspiring and frightening. Two decades later, as committed as I was to be on the ground in Ukraine to cover the coming war, I was not entirely prepared to be engulfed in the shock and awe myself this time around.
The prospect of a punishing air assault on Kyiv was not a surprise. I had been warning CNN since the previous November that US intelligence agencies were forecasting a wave of air and missile strikes as the first salvos of the Russian invasion. We had staffed up in the capital... with those threats in mind. But the call merited a discussion. Were we truly ready? My boss said he'd reach out to the White House and hung up the line.
PERSISTING DOUBTS
Still in bare feet and with my hair standing on end, I walked down the hall from my room to the suite turned CNN workspace to share the news with our staff and security team. Skepticism reigned. One colleague told me the congressman could be just looking to get in good with a TV reporter. Others wondered if I'd allowed myself to become a conduit for US disinformation. The doubters were not outliers. Despite repeated public warnings from US and NATO officials, many European and American commentators were not convinced. The word "imminent," as US officials had been describing the invasion for a handful of weeks now, had become a punch line. What does "imminent" mean? people asked. Tomorrow? Next week? Next year? The doubts didn't come from nowhere. US intelligence had missed Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea-and memories of Iraq's nonexistent WMD endured. "Why should we believe them this time?" they asked me.
I understood the doubts from years covering the intelligence agencies and holding a top secret security clearance myself. Over decades, the US had built the most comprehensive and capable intelligence-gathering apparatus in history, but its products required reading with a critical eye. However, the assessments of Russia's invasion plans were different, because the invading force was visible, laid out right before the watchful eyes of US surveillance satellites and aircraft. And what they saw was alarming. Russia was readying for war.
"Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were phantoms," I told them. "The Russian invasion force is right along the border in 3D. They're not guessing this time."
US agencies had collected other revealing intelligence as well. In a triumph of signals collection, the intel community had penetrated Russian communications networks. They now had direct access to Russian battlefield communications. They were listening in real time as Russian commanders discussed in detail preparing and positioning their units for attack.
Yet the doubts extended far beyond our newsroom, with some NATO leaders downplaying or even dismissing the more ominous warnings of an impending Russian invasion. Tensions broke out into the public discussion even between US and Ukrainian officials. On January 28, Ukrainian president Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv, "There is a feeling abroad that there is war here. That's not the case." Ukrainian officials were fearful in part that the more dire warnings might cause panic among the Ukrainian population, with the economic costs of fleeing businesses and a panicked end to travel in and out of Ukraine. But more broadly, Ukrainian officials told CNN privately, they feared that Ukraine was becoming a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess between the US and Russia.
With detectable pique, Zelensky said, "I can't be like other politicians who are grateful to the United States just for being the United States."
Russian officials were of course eager to dismiss the fears of war as well. On February 10, two weeks before Russian forces stormed into Ukraine, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov stood beside then UK foreign secretary Liz Truss and derided the West's warnings as purely emotional.
"The deployment of Russian troops on our own territory causes incomprehensible anxiety and very strong emotions among our British colleagues and other Western representatives," Lavrov said. "Unlike the hundreds and thousands of British troops stationed in the Baltics."
Beyond the public differences over just how real or imminent the Russian invasion threat was, there was disagreement within the alliance over the possibility of finding a so-called diplomatic off-ramp for Vladimir Putin. President Emmanuel Macron of France's dialogue with Putin continued into the week of the invasion.
Few begrudged Macron's attempts at peace. However, at the core of those efforts appeared to be a misreading of Russian intentions. Macron told Le Journal du Dimanche on February 6, eighteen days before the invasion, that Moscow's goal was "not Ukraine, but a clarification of the rules . . . with NATO and the EU." Here was the French leader saying that Putin had no territorial ambitions in Ukraine, only a desire to establish, among other things, that Ukraine would not be joining NATO anytime soon.
"We must protect our European brothers by proposing a new balance capable of preserving their sovereignty and peace," Macron said. "This must be done while respecting Russia and understanding the contemporary traumas of this great people and great nation."
The fiction that Russian ambitions were limited to preventing Ukraine from entering the NATO alliance would endure even after the invasion, on both sides of the Atlantic, as some conservative commentators and lawmakers in the US shifted blame for the invasion from Moscow to western l