| Hello from London,
Here’s some advice. Don’t kick off a war unless you’ve given it a spot of thought first. Perhaps you think that’s obvious. Surely those who toy with the fate of thousands, even millions, of their fellow humans, don’t do so casually? Those pulling the trigger, you might hope, try to be rational. Perhaps they even ask if it is right or wrong. Back when I studied how wars began, I immersed myself in scholarship on the possible structural reasons for it.
Increasingly, I’ve come to suspect something that expert commentators prefer not to admit. Plain idiocy and impulsiveness matter far more than typically thought. Two decades ago I wrote a book relating how a clutch of daredevil mercenaries—a Lebanese financier dubbed “Smelly”, a British SAS veteran, a son of a British prime minister—had just tried to execute a private war to topple an oil-rich African dictatorship. They failed, spectacularly. The main protagonist, Simon Mann, dropped dead a few days ago, apparently of a heart attack. What had driven him to launch his “Wonga Coup”? He was bored, wallowing in mid-life frustration, and thought a quick war would be fun. It was a casual throw of the dice, fatal for others.
Sound familiar? Early in 2022, almost nobody in Russia saw a need to invade Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, you might recall, hooted derisively at Western suggestions he would launch a war. Only a tiny handful of his closest advisers and planners knew of his half-baked plan. Mr Putin was sure his surprise war would last only a few days and end decisively in Russia’s favour. Three years on, and an estimated 200,000 Russian deaths later, not to mention the Ukrainian ones, Russia sits upon some tracts of eastern Ukraine. His own, casual, throw of the dice has been hugely more consequential, and fatal.
Then there’s the possibility that the world just dodged a nuclear conflict. The escalation of cross-border attacks between India and Pakistan in recent days was truly alarming. It was becoming thinkable, as tension worsened, that one or other side could judge that the threat (or actual use) of a nuclear weapon made some sort of sense. I don’t say that to be alarmist. I lived in the region for five years and spent a lot of time talking to military folk, spies, diplomats, politicians and academics both in India and Pakistan. I crossed between the countries pretty regularly. I also spent time in Kashmir, where a nasty mixture of repression and state-backed terrorism mean peace is impossible.
Having done all of that, I don’t believe the civilian leaders of either India and Pakistan really want a full-scale war, let alone a nuclear one. But they have casually allowed relations to fester. The way they address each other has become so bitter, and the thinking of many who wield power so small-minded, that they have left space wide open for the idiocy factor again—the casual throw of geopolitical dice. Who threw them? This time around it was, apparently, a group of three terrorists inside Kashmir. But there will always be some individual eager to do so: a religious extremist, an enraged man, a military spy hoping for a promotion or a general thinking of his place in history. India and Pakistan have done a miserable job of closing down that space. As a result, they have invited near-randomness to have far too much sway over their fates. Next time they might be far less lucky.
Thank you for all of your messages in the past week. I asked for your views on the prospects for a new pope and whether we might see the first one from Africa. Gervais Vieira, from Tampa, saw the election through the lens of American politics and warned that picking a black African would be criticised from some quarters as “another DEI act of wokeism”. Gervais, I suspect you are right. Quite a few of the rest of you also had American politics on your minds in calling for Donald Trump to be made pope. Martin Daly from Quesnel, in Canada, and many others, I can see what your intentions were. As it turned out the church now has Pope Leo from Chicago (my old home, for a spell). His elevation, I suspect, has pleased many Americans.
In the coming days Mr Trump will be in Saudi Arabia. I’d like to hear your views on his ambitions for Gaza and the Middle East more widely. Write to me at economisttoday@economist.com. |
