Top NATO official Adm. Rob Bauer warned Thursday that a larger war with Russia and other adversaries is a real threat amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Bauer, chair of the Western security alliance’s Military Committee, said “not everything is going to be hunky dory in the next 20 years.”
“I’m not saying it is going wrong tomorrow, but we have to realize it’s not a given that we are in peace,” he said at a press conference in Brussels. “That’s why we have the plans, that’s why we are preparing for conflict with Russia and the terror groups if it comes to it.”
Bauer emphasized the security alliance is defensive and does not seek conflict or a wider war.
“But if they attack us, we have to be ready,” he added.
I was banking on total world collapse within the next 20 years.
People have said that in the 1910s, late 1920s, late 1930s, late 1940s all the way up until the early 1990s, and then we started saying it for other reasons like climate change and AI. It’s always possible, but honestly not likely. The end of globalization will have some severe effects across the world like massive famine in countries that keep reproducing with no food security, but I don’t think we should constantly declare the sky is falling when we’ve proven just how resilient the world is in the wake of an all-out pandemic and supply chain crisis
From the Russian perspective, the world order already collapsed in 1991.
The problem is: for Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and many other countries, that’s when life started to get better. Russia thinks the opposite, they want to return to the time of the Soviet Union.
Nostalgia for the 1980s wouldn’t be a “collapse”. But… it’d be good for Russia, bad for USA and especially bad for Europe. It would be incredibly unpleasant to Poland, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine.