Dangerous Myths, Ukraine, and the Future of Great Power Competition

Editor’s note: This article introduces a full report based on a contemporary battlefield assessment conducted by the Modern War Institute. The authors of the report have led several such contemporary battlefield assessments—including to Sri Lanka (2016), the Republic of Georgia (2017), Colombia (2018), the Baltics and Ukraine (2018), and India (2019). They describe them as “research staff rides”—a combination of field research and traditional military staff ride—and have also produced a helpful guide for others who wish to plan and conduct similar research trips, A Leader’s Guide to Conducting Research Staff Rides. Great power competition has reentered the lexicon of policymakers and military strategists with a vengeance in recent years. The 2018 National Defense Strategy affirms that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” Yet great power competition—and at the extreme end of the competition continuum, great power conflict—is not likely to resemble its nineteenth- or twentieth-century antecedents. “Today’s versions of rivalry and competition,” writes Michael Mazarr, “almost always play out in the economic, political, cultural, and informational spheres—not on the battlefield.” Although the nuclear revolution makes “victorious wars of conquest” unlikely, it does not mean that great power competition cannot turn lethal, just as it did during the Cold War in places such as Vietnam and Afghanistan. The triggers for a great power war could be China’s or Russia’s embrace of some historical claim to a disputed territory or population it once controlled. The principal cause of such a conflict—fought with modern means over age-old disputes—is what Andrew Wilson calls “Russia’s addiction to dangerous myths.” These myths are not invented but rather have deep and divisive historical roots, a perversion of the “imagined communities” political scientists invoke to describe ethnonationalist conflict. Yet these myths animate a new type of great power conflict, ...