This article first appeared in Foreign Policy
Big labels and simple categories are convenient but distracting
Is this the start of World War Three? As the US-Israeli special military operation against Iran begins to look like a longer conflict, with alarming economic and military ripples right across the globe, headlines are sprouting. Doom-mongers say yes, optimists say no. Both are wrong. The question is misleading.
Leave aside for now the “this” in the question and try to define “start”? Did World War Two begin when Adolf Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939? Or when he attacked the Soviet Union in 1941? Some countries joined much later (Turkey waited until February 1945; the Soviet Union declared war on Japan only on August 9, a week before the surrender).
Or did it start earlier? The Czechs and the Slovaks would date the outbreak to the Munich agreement of 1938. Others would cite that deal’s even more cynical result, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Or blame the events that made this “might-is-right” world possible: Italy’s attack on Abyssinia in 1935, which capsized the League of Nations, or Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Nor is it clear when World War Two finally ended. Was it with the capitulation of Germany and Japan? Or with the crushing of the armed resistance movements in the Soviet empire: the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania and elsewhere? For Ukrainians the two world wars of the last century are just episodes in a much longer story about Russian imperialism, dating back to 1169 (when Andrei Bogolyubsky, the prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, besieged and ravaged Kyiv, then the capital of Rus’)
In short, wars are not like football matches, where the players form up on opposing sides, the referee blows a whistle and the game begins. They are messy and muddling to the observer: events often become significant only in retrospect. Whatever the “this” in the opening question, something else probably matters more.
It is also a mistake to focus on only one kind of warfare, such as the danger of “nuclear conflict”. These weapons have not been deployed in action since 1945. But they are routinely used for coercion. Russia’s nuclear sabre-ratting so scared the Biden administration (looking at you, Jake Sullivan) that it starved Ukraine of the weapons it needed to repel the invasion. Beware artificial geographical limits too. The much-celebrated “long peace” of post-war Europe after 1945 would have come as a surprise to those involved in terrorist conflicts in Spain, Germany, Italy or Northern Ireland, or in the all-out wars that divided Cyprus and the former Yugoslavia. “Peace” in this context has a special definition, not in the dictionary, which means “not within earshot of Brussels”.
Most important of all, no clear line separates war and peace, at least for the Kremlin, which sees conflict as an eternal feature of relations between states. The only question is the level of intensity. A little mild subversion and cyber-espionage? A full-blown sub-threshold attack involving sabotage, assassinations and attempts to bribe or blackmail decision-makers? A landgrab? These are questions of degree not principle.
Instead of thumb-sucking about how, when and where “World War Three” may start, it would be far better to concentrate on defence and deterrence in the conflict that is already raging, under our noses. Not just the bombing of Iran, with all its unpredictable consequences for regional stability, alliance cohesion and American credibility; and not just the war in Ukraine, now out of the headlines but still the biggest determinant of Europe’s security. Russia (and China) are playing divide-and-rule right across Europe, right now, and with alarming success. Leave “World War Three” to the scriptwriters. Concentrate on winning the fight that is already under way. This book review can be used in translation only, and with the following note and link at the end