General Sir Patrick Sanders, former chief of the general staff of the British military, issued a call for a massive increase in the military budget to prepare for a war on Russia and China in the near term. “We could end up with the axis powers—Russia and China, supported potentially by Iran and North Korea—collaborating to create a war on two fronts,” Sanders said on a podcast run by The Times of London.” The madman continued: “It would start with a large-scale confrontation in the Indo-Pacific, like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which draws off what remains of U.S. forces in Europe. An opportunistic Russia would then move against some part of a NATO territory where they know they can actually win by achieving local dominance, like the Baltics or somewhere in the high north like Svalbard [previously known as Spitzbergen, a Norwegian archipelago that lies at the convergence of the Arctic Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean—ed]. Having quickly seized limited objectives, limited territory, they sit back behind a nuclear umbrella and they dare NATO to act. Now that’s incredibly high stakes, but the payoff for Putin would be very, very high.”
If NATO was unable to come to the ally nation’s help and reverse the incursion, “it effectively means the end of NATO,” Sanders said. “So it’s double jeopardy, with global consequences.”
