War is as pervasive as the wish for peace is universal. Hostilities have already resumed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and are yet to cease in Ukraine. Indeed around half of all peace agreements collapse within five years. The use of force in inter-group relations has preoccupied the minds of rulers and scholars alike since time immemorial. But so too have some of the most charismatic and influential personalities in human history reflected on the renunciation of force and the possibility of eliminating it from human relationships. Numerous efforts were made in the 20th century to place increasing normative, legislative and operational fetters on the right of states to go to war. Yet the last century turned out to be the most murderous in human history. What if warfare is the normal condition of human society, and peace the exception that requires explanation? This century has witnessed the return of large-scale land warfare in the heart of Europe in Ukraine, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the biggest spike in geopolitical tensions in decades and the relentless rise of China as a modern military power while still ruled by its communist party. Of course, every conflict is unique and has its own distinctive attributes and dynamics. In addition, though, there are many factors that tilt the balance towards their perpetuation.
Sadly, it takes two to make peace, but only one to keep conflicts going. Thus North Korea cannot afford to make peace for fear of regime identity being completely submerged in a unified Korea. But it can’t afford to go to war, knowing that it would lose. So its policy is to continue the conflict by maintaining tension at a level short of provoking war. The same comments apply to Pakistan vis-à-vis India. Most long-lived conflicts develop an equilibrium and a set of vested interests which militate against efforts at finding peaceful solutions. In Kashmir, for example, a peaceful resolution of another possible nuclear flashpoint would diminish the role of the military in Pakistani politics and destroy the privileged position that it has enjoyed for all of Pakistan’s history. On the Indian side, the dispute with Pakistan is a potent political mobilisation force for the ruling BJP party. Kashmir is also a good example of competitive nationalisms, where the secular nationalism of India collides with the religious nationalism of Pakistan and the ethnic nationalism of Kashmiris. Conflicts can also be kept alive through appeals to kinship loyalties (and pocketbooks) of expatriate groups around the world like Irish Catholics, Sri Lankan Tamils and Indian Sikhs.
Sometimes the vested interest is financial. Examples of the profitable political economy of war include the so-called conflict diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone. Aspects of global ‘uncivil society’ (for example those involved in trafficking women, arms and drugs, mercenaries and laundering money) may also do very nicely out of protracted conflicts, thank you very much. Wars may start over control of lucrative resources or they may be rooted in group grievances but still end up being sustained by the greed of those who discover that profits can be made from fighting. Many of Africa’s post-Cold War conflicts fell into the pattern of greed and grievance. International conflict resolution modalities are designed for inter-state warfare. Yet most armed conflicts in recent times have been internal, albeit some with international dimensions. Is Taiwan – the most likely potential warzone in East Asia – a purely internal affair because it’s a province of China as claimed by Beijing? Have other countries kept the tensions in check or prolonged the conflict by going along with China’s pretend claims? It is also a particularly acute dilemma for the UN, as China is a permanent member of the Security Council – also a relevant consideration for Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine. Often, excluded and oppressed groups can launch wars of state formation based in their separate sense of national identity: Kosovars in Serbia, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Timorese in Indonesia. Many countries experienced wars of national liberation from colonial rule followed by wars of national debilitation of artificially constructed states.
Conflicts can be sustained by multiple contradictory logics, starting with peace and justice. Peace is forward-looking, problem-solving and integrative, requiring reconciliation between past enemies within an all-inclusive political community. Justice is backward-looking, finger-pointing and retributive, requiring trial and punishment of the perpetrators of past crimes. The logic of power is inconsistent with that of justice. Peace in Ukraine or the Middle East cannot be grasped without bending to the military superiority of Russia and Israel. But no peace agreement will last if it is fundamentally unjust to any substantial population group. The logic of negotiation tends to be contradictory. The stronger see no reason to compromise. The weaker fear that negotiations, if not delayed until parity or superiority has been attained, will force them into a humiliating sell-out of their cause. The logics of steadfast resolution and negotiated resolution are often at odds, as we are seeing with Trump’s efforts to broker a peace in Ukraine. Inflamed national passions fight against any negotiated compromise: principles are neither negotiable nor for sale and the aggressor must never be rewarded. Describing a war as values-based rather than in pursuit of national interests further circumscribes the scope for negotiations and compromise. The logics of the past and future can collide. If they are to enjoy peaceful coexistence, communities need to jettison the inherited baggage of historical hatreds. But competing myths are important for the social construction of political identity and history is a fiercely contested terrain. How can one be a Jew today without internalising the collective consciousness of the Holocaust? Palestinian refugees view efforts to refuse them the right to repatriation as an attempt to deny their collective history and identity.
History is also full of examples of missed opportunities. Yasser Arafat missed his moment at Camp David in 2000. Yet politically, he simply could not have sold that package to the Palestinian people and his fellow Arabs at that time. Could the same peace agreements have been signed over Cambodia and Northern Ireland five or 10 years earlier, or did we have to wait in both cases for mutual exhaustion in a stalemated conflict? It seems likely that the deal now available to Ukraine will be worse than what was within their grasp in the negotiations in March to April 2022: a withdrawal by Russia to pre-invasion borders if Ukraine agreed not to join NATO. Several officials from different countries have said that Western powers pressured Kyiv to scuttle the deal, including Boris Johnson during a visit to Kyiv in April 2022. This was confirmed by David Arahamiya, head of the Ukrainian delegation in the 2022 talks, in an interview on November 24th 2023. Conversely and more often, agreements are imposed by external actors against the will of one or both local warring parties. As soon as circumstances change, war resumes.
Ramesh Thakur is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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I can see why Trump is getting irritated with Putin, If Putin isn’t careful he will attract the full ire of the Trump administration and that means tens of billions in aid not just the odd billion! Trump will start supplying the real top notch stuff!
If Trump does then Russia will use its own “top notch stuff” that will lead to WW3.
Putin is a master of international law and he is surrounded himself with military strategists.
Trump wants to wash his hands of Ukraine so he can concentrate on war with Iran and/or China.
Russia will achieve its goals either by negotiation or on the battlefield.
Here’s a suggestion which I believe to be really helpful in this situation: Please tell Putin that he’s free to insert as many of his nukes as deeply into his rectum as he feels comfortable with. This will then have put them to some otherwise unachievable good use. There’s a German proverb Hunde die bellen, beißen nicht — dogs bark because they don’t dare to bite — which is very applicable to this recurring nuclear sabre-rattling.
We categorically don’t care.
Sorry but nukes are Putins only big play, he can never win a conventional proxy war with a fully US backed Ukraine,
See for yourself!
Oreshnik.
I had to look up the meaning of “Oreshnik”, and found this:
Russia’s Oreshnik missile: What we know – BBC News
Wow, so you think the US has nothing to counter this? Crikey
“US Space Force General David Thompson warned that American hypersonic missile capabilities are “not as advanced” as those of China or Russia, implying that the US is falling behind in producing the newest and most cutting-edge weaponry.”
https://sputnikglobe.com/20211121/space-force-general-admits-that-us-lagging-behind-russia-china-in-hypersonic-weapons-1090894495.html
Complete rubbish as you are fighting the wrong war. A drone costing a few hundred Roubles and produced on a daily basis will knock out your $50m dollar tank that will take two years to replace for example. The whole of NATO are set up to fight a different war.
At the behest of Israel re Iran…
I may be wrong about this, but I think Russia’s goals are more modest than Ukraine would have the world believe. The Ukrainian People of Crimea voted in a 2014 referendum to BREAK AWAY FROM UKRAINE and join Russia, and I reckon the Crimea is all that Putin wants to claim as Russian territory, which is full of Russians anyway.
I don’t see how this is anything for the West to get involved in at all, except to protest on humanitarian grounds at the Horrific Mass Slaughter of Slavic Warriors caused by both Putin & Zelensky in their insane Meatgrinder War.
Crimea is a Russian naval base whose native population (Tartars) got deported by Stalin. That personnel of and civilians attached to a Russian military installation occupied by Russian military at that time ‘voted’ to become Russian is completely meaningless. That’s a trick originally invented by the Bolshevists who came up with concept of self-determination of the peoples the American president of that time (Woodrow Wilson) just copied from them.
In full splendour, it works like this:
Second- and third-line Russian politicans also don’t exactly keep their desire to restore the status quo ante 1990 in full secret and there’s even a Russian political theorist who claims that this is Russia’s mission to bring racial justice for global majority people to the world by subjugating the white European racists/ Nazis.
People with some background in history will recognized this as a modernized variant of the theory of Moscow as the third Rome and thus, rightful ruler of all Slavs everywhere, no matter if they want this or not, and – by grace of Roosevelt, Churchill and God (in no particular order) – ethnical cleanser of all impure countries infected with non-Slavian people (although there’s probably little left to do here in Europe).
Apart from Crimea, Russia want the 4 Russian speaking Oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia as a DMZ or Buffer Zone between RF and NATO controlled Ukraine. It would be designated Novorossia and initially controlled from Moscow – that is what they wanted!
The idea that Russia plans further conquest seems risible, there is nothing to suggest they have any expansionist plans beyond those Russian speaking Oblasts. This seems to be a political and media fiction.
However, NATO should take steps to make any such attacks (on existing NATO countries) extremely damaging – trust, but verify and prepare to defend if necessary – after all we are constantly reminded NATO is a defensive coalition.
Any attacks Russia have made further into Ukraine appear to be reprisal attacks, when targets have been hit inside Russian territory, or following assassinations.
WAR is terrible, war is awful and innocent people die, sometimes in large numbers – the answer to that is peace! Zelensky needs to be removed and replaced, he seems to have forgotten he’s not in a movie, this is real, and many people are dying!
So petty and unprofessional, from yesterday’s fencing. Check your politics at the door and demonstrate proper sportsmanship, like the Italians seemingly can;
”Swiss fencing team branded ‘disrespectful’ for refusing to turn during the Israeli National Anthem, after Israel took gold at the U23 European Championships.”
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1916491396170604884
As for the sudden Pakistan vs. India flare-up, I read somewhere that India’s Modi is threatening to cut off Pakistan’s main water supply, by blocking off the upper reaches of the Indus River. Looking at the map below, I don’t understand how that is possible, since the British essentially gifted the whole of the Indus River Valley to the new Muslim country of Pakistan that was carved out of Indian territory 70 years ago at the Partition of India, which means Pakistan is a younger country than Northern Ireland. Any thoughts on this?
And look how Pakistani Muslims showed their gratitude: by swarming into Britain, bringing drugs, honour killings, human trafficking & rape gangs with them, while crushing hapless Pakistani Christians in a debt-slave system back home in Pakistan. According to international agencies, “Every brick in Pakistan is made by a Christian Slave.”
War is great for the political/media class and shite for everybody else.
Working people trying to raise their kids NEVER start wars, but always end up paying the consequences of politicians’ and religious leaders’ choices..
Absolutely right you are! The Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote,
“When the Rich wage war, it’s the Poor who die.”
Or as an English commenter said,
“War makes the rich richer, and the poor dead.”
It isn’t and it can’t. Interesting to see Baluchistan which is bound up in the Kashmir terrorist murders.
As Orwell described it in 1984, totalitarian systems necessarily exist in a permanent state of war, or at least war psychology.
War provides an excellent opportunity to implement extreme measures and exert total control over the population.
I suspect a lot of western governments, having had a taster session of absolute control over the population courtesy of Covid, would rather like a war situation that would provide them with justification to obtain unprecedented powers again. And that’s probably why there haven’t been any serious attempts by these governments to come up with a peace plan; the only way forward is more and more weapons, which of course translates into more and more corpses on both sides of the conflict.
Good points! Is it also part of the Globalist Depopulation Agenda?
Plus it is a distraction from their incompetence at home .
They all want their Falklands moment.
Hear, hear!
War should certainly not trump peace.
The claim “Sadly, it takes two to make peace” is generally correct but Trump could have ended two wars with a pen-stroke on his first day in office simply by stopping all weapon deliveries to Ukraine and Israel. It would have been so easy. Instead, Trump now bears responsibility for the continuation of two wars, whereby the Gaza conflict means Trump is additionally aiding and abetting the worst of all crimes: genocide.
The author refers to “The worst attack on Jews since the holocaust” but there is no mention of the infinitely worse attacks made by Israelis against Palestinians.
During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military. Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods were depopulated. Many of the settlements were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba)
And the Israelis initiated the 1956 war, they initiated the 1967 war, they initiated the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and now they are mounting a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people, not to mention attacking and bombing practically every neighbouring country in the area.
Quoting Col. Douglas Macgregor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djo10WRZrIg):
I cannot conceive of any set of circumstances under which I, as an American citizen, would condone, legitimate or promote mass murder and expulsion of millions of people from their homes in Gaza. And it makes no difference to me whether the people there are Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians or Jews, or Chinese or German or Russian or Ukrainian or anything else.
Israel is waging a war of annihilation against a group of people that they have condemned as subhuman, as animals, and not exclusively there by the way: I haven’t seen much evidence for mercy offered to anyone in Lebanon or Syria or anywhere else in the region who stands up and opposes Israel and its dominance, its hegemony.
Israel has murdered more than 200 journalists and more than 400 aid workers in Gaza. Only recently, Israeli soldiers murdered 15 ambulance crew members and buried them underneath their flattened ambulances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMhqIe0wus).
Since 18th March, when Israel broke the so-called ceasefire and resumed its mass-scale slaughter in Gaza, nearly 1,900 Palestinians have been killed and around 5,000 have been injured. That figure includes approximately 600 children killed and approximately 1,600 children injured in just five weeks. (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-imposes-starvation-design-gaza)
Israel has now imposed more than 50 days of a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting entry of all humanitarian aid, water, food, fuel and medical supplies, while Israeli forces accelerate the forced displacement of Palestinians, pushing them into smaller and smaller areas.
One single week’s worth of Israeli atrocities are documented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1tVFNGr73M.
All the while, a solution for peace would be easy. Quoting Prof. Jeffrey Sachs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL_0GSOQkf8):
What we need for peace – and the whole world is saying it except for Netanyahu and the Israel lobby – is we need a State of Palestine living alongside a State of Israel. This is the whole story for peace in the Middle East …
There’s one vote only that separates us today from peace and that is the US veto in the UN Security Council that blocked Palestine becoming the 194th UN member state [“because of the iron grip that the Israel lobby has on American foreign policy”] … It’s one vote, it’s our vote. Israel has no veto over a State of Palestine.
The International Court of Justice ruled last year that Israel’s boundaries are the boundaries of 4th June 1967. The United Nations, by an overwhelming, overwhelming majority – 95% of the world’s population – has called for there to be a State of Palestine.
But still we are only reminded of the holocaust during WWII. No criticism of Jews is ever allowed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/28/putin-trump-zelensky-war-peace-defence-spending-4pc/
‘…..the deal now available to Ukraine will be worse than what was within their grasp in the negotiations in March to April 2022’
In all probability, had Russian terms of surrender been accepted in April 2022, Russian forces would by now be in control of Kyiv, Odessa, Chisinau, quite possibly, the Suwalki corridor and much else. We know this quite simply because that is what they tell us themselves.
‘From day one, we were taught that Russia is and must remain a derzhava — a “great power.” Not just one country among many, but a pole in a multipolar world. A country destined to challenge the West. That belief — fused with resentment, imperial nostalgia and a constant sense of grievance — forms the backbone of Russian diplomacy.
At MGIMO, we were taught to cite international law while violating its spirit, to defend norms while dismantling them and to speak of peace while justifying and waging wars. Georgia. Syria. Ukraine. These weren’t deviations. We deployed whichever claim of “Territorial integrity” or “self-determination” suited the day’s talking point. This is Russian anti-normism in action.’
Britain now requires an annual defence budget of £130bn. VAT must rise by 5% immediately in order to pay for this.
As that distinguished soldier, General Sir Richard Dannatt, so eloquently points out in today’s DT, Ukraine has bought us time to rearm.
We must not waste it.
The knowledge surrounding these wars and political confrontations is like a floating iceberg. Only 10% of it is visible. 90% of the true driving factors and benefitting parties are never public knowledge. Even after major conflicts are finished, the victor manages the story. It’s like living in a made up fairytale.
War never trumps peace.
Peace is achieved through deterrence.
Deterrence trumps war.
Unfortunately, arrant stupidity trumps everything……