Changing partners in times of war

The Trump/Netanyahu war in the Middle East will not spread any further, and nothing going on there threatens our collective existence. The only countries that have nukes in the Middle East are Israel and the United States. Iran has none now and has never even been close to having them.

Mountains of lies have been told about this by interested parties over the years, but every intelligence agency on the planet (including the American ones) knows that the Iranian regime never even made a decision to try for nukes.

Enough about that. All the pretexts that have been advanced by Trump and Netanyahu to justify the second illegal attack on Iran in less than a year are patently false. They should be rejected not because the Iranian regime deserves to survive (it doesn’t), but because they do such harm to the international law that we all depend on to prevent great wars.

The more important question is whether the Long Peace of the past 80 years is over.

Perhaps the impression that illegal wars are surging is just an optical illusion created by a single powerful individual who is having a run of flashy but inconsequential military victories. However, the historical pattern does show long periods of relative peace punctuated by shorter periods of very high military activity.

The first Long Peace of the modern period came after 25 years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). The constant wars had involved all the great powers of the time and killed around four million people in a world with only one-eighth of today’s population, so everybody was ready for a rest.

During the next hundred years (1815-1914) there were a number of shorter wars that involved two or even three of the six great powers, especially around the mid-point when Italy and Germany fought unification wars. However, there were no long wars in which all the great powers fought each other in two huge rival alliances.

That phase of the cycle returned in the two World Wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, better seen as a protracted 30-year war in which almost identical alliances embracing all the great powers fought each other twice.

The death toll was at least 50 million that time, and by 1945 most of the big cities of Europe and Asia were smashed flat. Two of those cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons. But then we were granted another Long Peace: 80 years during which no two great powers have fought each other directly.

Historians can find specific economic or ideological causes for all these wars, but there is clearly also something bigger driving this cycle. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that one sign that a Long Peace is ending is a rapid switching of alliances. That is happening now.

Consider the NATO countries in Europe, which have realized that the United States is no longer their ally. As they consider the options for a Europeans-only NATO, their greatest need is an independent nuclear deterrent to replace the old U.S. guarantee.

The only nuclear weapons in the European Union belong to France, so could French nukes protect all the members of NATO 2.0? France’s President Emmanuel Macron thinks so, and eight other European countries — the U.K., Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden and Denmark — have agreed to a new “advanced deterrence” strategy.

France will build more nuclear warheads (current total 300), and its Strategic Air Forces will be “spread across the depth of the European continent… and thus complicate the calculations of our adversaries.” Entirely rational, but it is a kind of nuclear proliferation.

If we are heading into a world of changed alliances and more wars, then the natural partner for a post-NATO Europe is China, an authoritarian state but one that still defends the international rule of law.

Such an alliance (or just an alignment) would also be attractive to many developing countries, because it could provide some protection from predatory regional powers like Russia and the United States (if they continue on their present courses). But a far preferable alternative would be to climb into the time machine, go back to 2020, and reset (without COVID, of course).

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’. The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.