This Christmas season, the Editor of Foreign Affairs (FA) magazine, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, sent out an email Dec. 20 with the startling subject line: “The Return of Total War.” That was the title of an article published by FA the year before, on Oct. 24, 2024, which the editor urged everyone to read again. Foreign Affairs is the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which was set up in 1921 as a “sister think tank” to the British Monarchy’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)—the same oligarchs whipping Europe into a war frenzy today
The promoted article was subtitled “Understanding—and Preparing for—a New Era of Comprehensive Conflict.” Its author, Mara Karlin, was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities in the Biden administration who oversaw the development and implementation of the hair-raising 2022 National Defense Strategy, a document which led EIR to ask at the time: Who’s Playing Nuclear Chicken, and Why?
That 2024 Biden policy still applies, FA editor Kurtz-Phelan proclaimed. “Total war is back. Indeed, there are signs everywhere that countries are preparing for all-out conflicts. Just this week, the Trump administration asked Congress to approve the largest-ever U.S. arms package for Taiwan, and the head of the British military said the United Kingdom needs more people `ready to fight,’ given threats from Russia.” Karlin’s advice for Washington “is persuasive, if counterintuitive,” he wrote; “the best way to avoid a total war is gearing up to fight one.”
Karlin’s premise is that war is man’s natural condition. “Every age had its own kind of war,” she wrote at the outset, citing Carl von Clausewitz. War is different today than during the post-9/11 “war on terror,” whose wars—which destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. etc.—she dismisses as “highly circumscribed … often limited in scale and waged in remote locations.”
