Why is it too late to stop World War III?!

Could Iran develop nuclear weapons? Will China invade Taiwan? As the world teeters on the brink of global conflict, we're asking the wrong questions.

By: Richard Overy, historian, author of the newly sabotaged book, Why the war? [WhWhat is it?] / The Daily Telegraph (original title: Why it's too late to stop World War 3 – according to one of Britain's greatest military historians)
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Imagine, for a moment, that the Iranian government announces that it has developed a nuclear bomb and threatens to use it against Israel. The United States responds with the threat of military intervention, as it did in Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Iran signals that it will not tolerate a Third Gulf War and seeks allies. American forces are massing to enter Iran, which declares national mobilization. Russia, China, and North Korea express support for Iran, while Washington expands its intervention forces, including a British contingent. Russia gets involved, raising tensions, in the expectation that the West will back down. Nuclear deterrence ensues, but with fingers on the trigger and nerves on edge on both sides, as leaders gamble on the risk of first strike. It all ends in disaster. World War III begins with a nuclear exchange of fire – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Or, imagine this: China’s frustration over Taiwan’s status prompts it to amass an invasion force. The United States is mired in a domestic political crisis. Japan watches with concern the exchange of harsh words between China and Taiwan, wondering whether it should intervene. The United Nations condemns China’s actions, but China rejects the rebuke and orders the invasion, convinced that a quick victory will prevent others from intervening—just as Hitler hoped when he invaded Poland in 1939. The United States activates its contingency plans to save Taiwan, and both sides use tactical nuclear weapons against each other’s forces. North Korea and Russia align themselves with China. There is no all-out nuclear strike, but Russia warns Europe to stand aside, dividing American strategy between two fronts—just as in World War II. The conflict escalates further.

Now let us consider a completely different kind of global conflict. The growing rift between the democratic West and the arc of authoritarian states across Eurasia has entered a dangerous new chapter. Neither side wants to risk direct war, but there is a possibility that the destruction of satellite communications could cripple the adversary’s military and economic capabilities. Without warning, the West’s satellite communications system is attacked, causing massive damage to its commercial and military electronic networks.

No one takes responsibility for the missile launches, but in the chaos that follows, blame is quickly placed on anti-Western states. Retaliation is difficult to organize, due to the collapse of communications. Unsure of what to do, Western countries order military mobilization, but Russia and China demand that the war stop. As in 1914, the mechanism, once set in motion, is difficult to stop, and the crisis deepens. Welcome to the First Space War.

All three of these scenarios are possible, although none of them, to be clear, is plausible. Predicting – or rather, preconceived notions of – future wars can produce dangerous fantasies that fuel anxiety about global security. Even the most plausible prediction is likely to turn out to be wrong. The development of nuclear weapons has significantly changed the nature of any future global conflict. There is no doubt that armed forces around the world have contingency plans for a range of scenarios that may seem implausible in the real world. And while history can help us understand the shape of a future war, its lessons are rarely learned.

Yet the question of how a Third World War might break out preoccupies us today more than at any time since the end of the last world war. The very act of predicting it is evidence of our expectation that war, in one form or another, remains a reality in a world filled with many uncertainties. The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, and Sudan are reminders of this ever-present truth. And regular threats from Russia to use nuclear weapons suggest that our fantasies may not be as far from reality as we might think.

Perhaps in trying to predict the outbreak of a future war, we should ask another question: Why do we fight? War has been a feature of almost all of recorded history, and the violence of war preceded the creation of the first states. Why human beings evolved aggression alongside their capacity for social cooperation remains a fundamental question.

This is a puzzle that has grappled with the human sciences for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. For evolutionary biologists and psychologists, war was a means for early humans to ensure survival, protect their kin, and cope with ecological crises. No human biologist today argues that violence is genetic, but early hominins, organized into small groups of hunter-gatherers or fishermen, likely used violence to protect themselves from outsiders, to secure resources and food, and occasionally to attack neighboring communities. The use of violence as an element of survival became psychologically normal, as well as biologically beneficial. According to this view, the aspect of war is deeply embedded in human development.

However, this approach is challenged by other sciences, which see war as a phenomenon linked to the development of cultures and political systems, be they tribes, proto-states or states. Around 10 thousand years ago, there is no doubt that something resembling war appeared throughout the world, as evidenced by archaeological finds of weapons, iconography and fortifications.

The war was not like modern wars, organized with massive armies and supplied by military industries, but took different forms: a deadly attack, a ritual confrontation or a massacre, such as the killings at Nataruk dating back to the 9th century BC. The remains of men, women (one of them pregnant) and children, discovered at this site near Lake Turkana in Kenya, show that the victims were beaten and stabbed to death.

It seems clear that a state was not necessary to exercise violence, as tribal warfare over the past few hundred years has shown, but warfare led to the emergence of a warrior elite and a culture in which warfare was glorified and approved: the Spartans, the Vikings, the Aztecs. There have been very few cultures in which warfare has not played a role, usually a central role, in the life of the community. In the historical period of states, some five thousand years ago, there is no example where warfare was not an accepted practice.

This, however, does not say much about the reasons why wars have been fought in the distant past or in the present. Wars have always been fought for something, whether to appease the gods by capturing prisoners for execution or sacrifice, to plunder resources, for beliefs, to extend power over others, to have more security, or simply to defend against an enemy. This mix of motives has remained surprisingly unchanged.

The acquisition of resources is an obvious motive for war, an explanation that extends from the ancient Romans who destroyed enemy cities, took slaves and treasures, and imposed tribute, to Japanese forces in 1942 who seized Southeast Asia’s oil and raw material reserves, needed to continue the war. Wars of faith also extend over millennia, from the Muslim conquests of the Middle East and North Africa in the early Middle Ages, the era of Christian crusades that followed, to the current jihad campaigns by militant Islam.

Security, as Thomas Hobbes recognized in his work Leviathan [Leviathan] of 1651, is always at risk in an anarchic world, where there is no common power to guarantee it. Borders are a flashpoint of security fears and distrust, as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza illustrate today. But even the long Chinese frontier with the steppe nomads and the vast frontier of the late Roman Empire were sites of constant transgression, defensive battles, and punitive expeditions.

The pursuit of power is perhaps the most common explanation for war—especially popular with political and social scientists. Power Transition Theory, formulated at the height of the Cold War, views history as an ongoing contest between great hegemonic powers, with one trying to outdo the other. It argues that this contest can end in war, as a declining power tries to defend its position, or a rising power seeks to supplant it. Once, this theory applied to the United States and the Soviet Union, but they never fought each other directly; now, it applies to a potential war between the United States and China, which has become a favorite scenario for those predicting 1914st-century conflicts. However, it is a theory that does not work well. Both world wars began with a great power attacking a lesser one—Serbia in 1939, Poland in XNUMX—and then drawing other powers into the conflict. The same thing could happen to Taiwan, just as it is already happening to Ukraine.

Power works best as an explanation when history focuses on individuals who pushed themselves to become great conquerors, men who through their sheer ambition mobilized popular support for unlimited conquests – Leka the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. This is hubristic power, based on arrogant self-confidence, and it usually evaporates with the death or defeat of the leader. But as long as they lead and there are people willing to follow, war is unlimited and destructive – on a large scale. This is the most dangerous and unpredictable explanation for the persistence of war, and it pervades all of human history. It is one of the clearest indications that war still has a future, just as it has a long past.

The wars of the future are based on a grim legacy. The fact that peace seems to be the most rational option for most people has never been enough to curb the desire to fight when it seems necessary, profitable, or an obligation. And this legacy is the main reason why it is possible to imagine a future war. After the end of the Cold War, there was a tendency to say that war had become an obsolete issue – if it were, perhaps we would be living in a world without weapons and without fear today. While few people would actively seek World War III, few predicted or desired the first two. The sad reality is that our knowledge of the reasons why wars break out has so far contributed very little to eliminating it as a persistent element of human affairs. /Telegraph/