The Recurrence of War

Abstract

Speculation about the new millennium has tended to stress a positive future, fuelled by economic prosperity and the Internet revolution. If it has expressed a note of concern, it has, above all, been about the inequality that is accompanying globalization and the prospect of this increasing. The perceptive Financial Times correspondent Martin Wolf wrote in one of his final columns of the last century that if there is one thing he would most wish to see in the future it would be the reduction in global inequality.¹ There is, however, one wish that is, arguably, even greater than that, and which takes precedence over all others, namely peace. The dangers of war, and the need to think clearly about them, have not disappeared from the world horizon. The world may be living on the edge of a new peaceful, globalized era without, at least, major conflicts between developed states. It may, however, be living in an ‘Interregnum’, a time when the dangers of war have receded, only to return later. The twentieth century has, among other perils, bequeathed to the twenty-first thousands of nuclear warheads, the means to deliver them, and the anxieties to continue deploying them. Outside the developed world, conflict, and preparation for it, continues and this may, in various ways, affect the developed world itself. A generation hence observers may look back contemptuously at the contemporary world as living in a fool’s paradise, neglecting the causes of subsequent conflict and destruction. Carl von Clausewitz talked, rightly, of the ‘fog of war’ but it is also peace, with the complacency it generates and the hidden dangers it incubates, which generates its own fog of illusions, perhaps never more so than today.