Do most countries want peace or war? If you take the statements of leaders at face value, nearly all opt for peace.
US President Donald Trump boasts of ending eight wars, and was recently awarded Fifa’s new peace prize. Chinese state media has said that President Xi Jinping has been “unrelenting” in his “pursuit of peace”. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said: “We need a lasting and stable peace on solid foundations that would satisfy both Russia and Ukraine, and would ensure the security of both countries.” The Gulf states want peace, and so do countries in South-East Asia.
European and Nato leaders, on the other hand, appear to be desperate for confrontation.
Within the last week, Britain’s Armed Forces minister, Al Carns, has said: “The shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door and that war could be bigger and bloodier than what we have experienced in recent times.” Nato’s Secretary General, former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, went further. “We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,” he told an audience in Germany. And Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, informed the European Parliament that among “the greatest challenges of our time” was “a full-scale war on our continent”.
Now, it would be fair to point out that Europe’s figureheads are not lone standouts in a sea of peaceniks.
The Trump White House has been acting very aggressively towards the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and has not ruled out a ground invasion of the country. China has territorial and maritime border disputes with many countries in the region, and these have led to close encounters and occasionally deadly clashes; although I should add that there are always two sides to such incidents, and Beijing would reject the idea that it was solely to blame.
And then, of course, there is Russia, which is the country European leaders are issuing dire warnings about. Even the Chinese leadership was said to have been discomfited by the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Mr Putin has made it very clear that he does not believe Ukraine to be a “real country” and wrote an essay in 2021 titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. It’s a revealing read.
At the same time, however, we will never know if the tragedy that has befallen Ukraine could have been prevented. What if the US had not supported the Maidan Revolution that toppled then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014? The US political scientist John Mearsheimer wrote an essay that same year titled Why the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault, in which he stated: “For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president – which he rightly labelled a ‘coup’ – was the final straw.”
It doesn’t take much research to confirm that as a matter of law, Mr Mearsheimer was correct: the move was illegal, and it was a coup. Labelling these “Russian talking points” doesn’t strip them of the truth.
In 2023, then-Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said that Mr Putin sent a draft treaty in 2021 for the organisation to sign that would promise no more Nato enlargement, and that was a “pre-condition” for him not to invade Ukraine. “Of course we didn’t sign that,” Mr Stoltenberg said. What if he had? My point is that there were options to try to avert Russia’s war on Ukraine; and they were not taken.
But in any case, what Mr Rutte in particular is talking about is far bigger than Ukraine, and arguably far bigger than Russia, whatever Moscow’s objectives. He mentioned war on the scale “our grandparents or great-grandparents endured”. That only means one thing: it means world war. And I believe that to be a frighteningly reckless statement by the leader of the 32-nation military alliance; that nothing on the horizon could possibly justify it; and that it only makes devastating conflict more likely.
Yes, the ancient Roman adage regularly gets trotted out: “if you want peace, prepare for war.” But I would also add: “If you want war, prepare for war.”
After endlessly demonising not just countries, but their cultures too, and treating them as evil monoliths – as Europe has done with Russia and China – it shouldn’t be a surprise if they assume defensive, and if necessary offensive, postures.
We have seen this on so many levels. British Council offices are viewed as harmless outposts of UK soft power, but China’s Confucius Institutes are considered dangerous tools of indoctrination. Europe has no trouble with the US taking a special interest in its “near abroad”, but it is apparently wrong for China or Russia to do the same.
The British historian and editor Max Hastings once wrote, in a moment of candour, what underpins this total refusal on the part of European and pre-Trump American leaders to understand the points of view of others: “We know we’re the good guys.”
The corollary of this is that others must be the “bad guys”; but assuming they have malign intentions can backfire. One example: Mr Xi is often condemned in the West for China’s rapid military build-up since he came to power in 2012.
However, two defence academics from the US and Australia have separately told me that they’d heard chatter in Washington more than 15 years ago that China was an adversary, and that it might be best for the US to strike first while its armed forces had overwhelming superiority. As one said to me: “If I was hearing it, you can bet Beijing was too.” And what would be the logical response of any country in that position?
There is no doubt that hybrid warfare is taking place: spying, disrupting, infiltrating, preparing plans to cut undersea cables and the like. But if China and Russia are engaged in such activities, you would have to be very naive not to believe that Nato member states aren’t doing exactly the same thing.
It is a very long way from that, however, to essentially declaring that a world war could be imminent – a dangerously escalatory claim that risks inflaming tensions and making conflict more likely. Be prepared, for sure, but Nato – which we are frequently told is a defensive, not an offensive, alliance – should be placing far more emphasis on seeking peace, not fighting ghosts of its own overheated imagination.
It is not “forever Munich”, as politicians such as Mr Rutte like to warn in reference to the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement where other European powers permitted Nazi Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Be wary of constantly saying that it is, lest it turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
