American doctrine for years held that the military should be prepared to fight two major conflicts simultaneously. Now we’re faced with four. After the defeat of the Soviet Union, and amid the Obama-Biden administration’s desire to ramp up domestic spending for “stimulus” and ObamaCare, the two-war goal was considered overly ambitious. It was dialed back.

“A two-land-war capability is no longer appropriate for the age of austerity,” a current Pentagon adviser, Michael O’Hanlon, who is a member of the Defense Policy Board, wrote in a 2011 Brookings Institution commentary. Over the past week, it has become clear that America is confronting not merely a two-war scenario but a four-front global conflict.

In size, complexity, and intensity, it is beginning to look more like World War II or the Cold War, more sprawling than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that were battles in what is sometimes referred to as the Global War on Terror or World War IV. In the attack on Israel by Iran’s Gaza-based proxies; the surge of illegal immigrants and fentanyl through the U.S. border with Mexico, the gathering conflict with Communist China, and the war between Ukraine and Russia, Washington now has its hands full and its feet full, too.

The war dominating front-page headlines is the attack from Gaza into Israel by two terrorist groups — Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who are Iranian proxies  —  that has killed 800 Israelis. To see this as an Israeli fight exclusively would be to misread it.

The Iranians chant “death to Israel, death to America.” American citizens are among the Israelis being held hostage in Gaza, and four Americans were among those killed in the attack from Gaza. The Iranians had held another five Americans hostage before the Biden administration paid a $6 billion ransom for their release in a prisoner swap deal last month.

The Iranian revolution began with holding more than 50 Americans hostage in the American embassy in Tehran from 1979 to 1981. Iran is also informally allied now with Russia against Ukraine and with Communist China against America.

The Mexico border situation involves two risks — an influx of asylum seekers, refugees, and illegal immigrants overwhelming American cities, and a plague of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is killing Americans in drug overdoses.

The New York Times, which sometimes denounces as racist concerns about Mexican crime, recently acknowledged that in 2022 fentanyl killed more Americans than the total number of Americans who died in the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars. “Most of the fentanyl sold in the United States is coming from Mexico, where drug cartels synthesize the drugs from precursor chemicals believed to come from factories in China,” the Times says.

Communist China is widely viewed as America’s biggest strategic threat. It’s already the world’s second-largest economy, and its military spending is second only to the United States. It’s blocked international investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 virus. 

It has eradicated freedom in Hong Kong and is threatening Taiwan. It’s active within America, and the American government warns that Communist China is “capable of launching cyber attacks that could disrupt critical infrastructure services within the United States, including against oil and gas pipelines, and rail systems.”

Finally, there’s Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, where America has committed about $43.9 billion in security assistance since February 2022. America’s NATO allies have also stepped up to aid Ukraine, reasoning that if Russia wins there, the Kremlin will use it as a stepping stone to extend Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship further into Europe.

How does America possibly have any hope at victory on all four of these fronts? The best chance lies in understanding both that we are in a war and that there are ways to win that do not involve putting a lot of American troops under enemy fire.

What the Rand Corporation’s Raphael Cohen calls the “Ukraine Model” would have America engage by supplying arms to “countries with the leadership and national resolve to effectively employ such military aid.”

During the Cold War, labor unions, human rights groups, and religions helped to defeat the Soviet Union; perhaps a similar Solidarity, Al Shanker, Lane Kirkland, Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky-style effort could help again today.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. It’s a power Congress has traditionally been reluctant to exercise until after the enemy has attacked us in a visible event like Pearl Harbor or the attacks of September 11, 2001 — the logic being that it waits for the war it is declaring to exist. Waiting until after the attack from Gaza to declare war is what Prime Minister Netanyahu did, too.

The outcomes of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were reminders of the risks of trying to remake the world. A painful lesson of the Gaza slaughter, though, is that it is a delusion to let the enemy fester behind a fence. Better to adopt a forward strategy for freedom. 

Israel’s greatest military victory was in 1967, when it launched a preemptive attack that destroyed the Egyptian air force while it was still on the ground. That is something for Americans to consider as the war clouds scud on all four fronts.