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Joel Campbell, The Senkaku paradox: risking Great Power war over small stakes, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 3, May 2020, Pages 842–844, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa075
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In the 1934 Marx Brothers satire Duck Soup, two fictional countries go to war because Sylvania's ambassador calls Freedonia's president an ‘upstart’. Today, the world could go to war because of territorial disputes involving barely inhabited or uninhabited scraps of land. The Senkaku paradox, derived from the set of vacant East China Sea islets controlled by Japan but claimed by China, suggests that war over insignificant pieces of land might not seem worth it to America and its allies. Veteran analyst Michael O'Hanlon, while mildly optimistic that such conflicts can be avoided, raises the alarm for leaders to prepare more fully for potentially disastrous events. He proposes a kind of ‘asymmetric defence’ involving elements of both military deterrence and the use of economic sanctions in response to possible Russian or Chinese actions (p. 3). This is both a well-argued thesis and a sobering look into the abyss, but ultimately one that may be more frightening than illuminating.
