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It is depressingly clear that the political landscape of the 21st century will be shaped by war just as much as it was in the 20th century. Since 2022-23, military conflicts have erupted in what historically have been the world’s two biggest war zones – Eastern Europe and the Middle East – and they are escalating.
Political leaders seldom understand how radically the politics of war differ from the politics of peace. Everything is at a more serious level. Mistakes in wartime tend to be irretrievable, affecting the fate of whole nations. Demonising the enemy as cowardly bluffers and belief in one’s own self-congratulatory war propaganda leads to appalling errors of judgement.
In peacetime, electorates may get away with voting for buffoons and demagogues like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Silvia Berlusconi without doing too much damage. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan allegedly suffered from Alzheimer’s while in office, but that did not matter too much because he had a strong team around him and he did not start any major wars.
Under-covered and under-reported
By way of contrast, President Joe Biden began to falter mentally during his first year in office at the time of the US retreat from Kabul in 2021, according to eyewitnesses. Concealed by an inner core of senior staffers, his cognitive failure escalated until it became undeniable when he became incoherent during his debate with Trump on 27 June, 2024.
Forced to withdraw his candidacy, he reportedly still deludes himself that he would have won had he stayed in the presidential race.
A largely anti-Trump US media is now being castigated for its failure to report on Biden’s mental incapacity, described by Jan Crawford of CBS News last week as the most “under-covered and under-reported” story of 2024.
Too late
This should raise the far more important question about how far Biden’s impaired judgement contributed to the outbreak of – and failure to stop – wars in Ukraine and the Middle East over the past three years.
How far was Biden capable of making up his mind about anything? Or was he manipulated by others in the White House with their own hawkish agendas? Did some anonymous decision-maker working from what President Barack Obama derided as the mindlessly aggressive “Washington Playbook” take on board that the bloodbath in Gaza has provoked hatred in the Arab world that may poison the politics of the region for generations?
Previous US administrations, however hawkish, had stepped in to prevent wars starting in Europe or escalating in the Middle East, but Biden bizarrely did the opposite. He was feeble when he should have been determined, stubborn when he should have been flexible. American diplomacy took a back seat. Trump may speak of ending these conflicts, but wars do not have a handy reverse gear, and it may be too late.
Wars are usually started by people who think they can win them. It is at this point that having a dolt in command determines the course of history. Napoleon III believed this in 1870 when he over-confidently began his war against Prussia that produced a calamitous French defeat. Kaiser Wilhelm II played a crucial role in ensuring that Germany was outnumbered and fought a war on two fronts in 1914.
Survival of the fittest
Yet it is not solely idiots and fools who have begun wars they did not need to fight, or were likely to lose. One of the ablest British prime ministers in the 20th century, David Lloyd George, lost his job in 1922 when he threatened war with Turkey. Another able politician, Tony Blair, never really recovered from joining the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with little idea of what he was getting into, as is clear from his memoirs.
Rivalry between states is always about the survival of the fittest, but wars vastly accelerate this Darwinian elimination of the less fit. Personal, institutional and military weaknesses that had lingered unnoticed for years produce an immediate collapse under war-time stresses.
President Vladmir Putin launched the Russian army in its disastrous invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in the expectation of a walkover, only to see his expensive but corrupt military machine humiliatingly bogged down on the road to Kyiv. Only six weeks ago, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad confidently supposed that his civil war was won and he need not compromise with Turkey and the Syrian rebels.
Chaos is inseparable from warfare
War is a harsh and revealing reality check, exposing the best-laid plans as vulnerable to unexpected enemy counter-plans. Seeking a quick advantage, protagonists make terrible mistakes. In 1917, for instance, Germany optimistically started unrestricted U-boat attacks, wrongly billed as a war-winning strategy, which brought the US into the war and ensured a German defeat.
There is no assurance that combatants will act in their own best interests. At the beginning of my journalistic career in 1980, I had just been in Tehran and Baghdad and was confidently writing that Saddam Hussein, previously a canny political player, would not attack Iran, where millions of fanatical young men were willing to fight, because it would be an amazingly stupid thing to do. Shortly after I had finished pontificating, Saddam did just that, starting the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.
Chaos is inseparable from warfare, the only certainty being the death and maiming of great numbers of people. Yet, with chilling frequency, bloodthirsty hawks and democracy-defending doves both declare that Ukraine must fight on until Russia is defeated or retreats from Ukrainian territory, something that nobody believes likely.
Ukraine asks for, and is grudgingly given, supposedly game-changing Western weapons from heavy tanks to long range missiles. But these will achieve strategic gains for Ukraine only if they prod Moscow into firing back at Ukraine’s allies, thereby drawing them into a wider war on Ukraine’s side. This is much against Russia’s interests, but that does not guarantee it will not happen.
What our leaders are really made of
The US and Europe are about to see what their leaders are really made of and the prospect is not encouraging. All countries at some point have leaders not up to the job, but this is especially true at the present moment.
Between 2010 and 2024, the UK had a run of what were probably the worst leaders in its history. Sir Keir Starmer may be an improvement, but he could scarcely have lost the last general election, such was the unpopularity of the Tories. Trump’s political triumphs likewise owe much to the low and self-destructive quality of Hillary Clinton and Biden.
Wars are like epidemics. If not stopped, they spread. Israel, backed by the US, has had huge successes against Hamas and the Palestinians, Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia, and indirectly against Assad in Syria. But a complete Israeli-US victory requires the military defeat of Iran or regime change in Tehran. Trump’s Maga Republicans may be too divided between isolationists and neoconservative hawks to back a war or to stop one.
In both Ukraine and the Middle East, too much blood may already have been spilt for a feasible compromise to end the swelling tide of violence.
Further Thoughts
I have been reporting on wars in the Middle East and elsewhere since the 70s. I saw the corpses of slaughtered Palestinian women and children heaped up in alleyways in Sabra and Shatila in south Beirut after the massacre by Christian militiamen overseen by the Israeli army in 1982. At that time, the US and UK expressed horror at what had happened, as did the thousands of Israelis who took to the streets to protest.
In the decades since, I have witnessed the aftermath of other massacres, such as that at Camp Speicher on the Tigris River in Iraq, where in 2014 Isis murdered 1,700 young men, captured air force cadets, and dumped their bodies in the river or in mass graves. Governments throughout the world expressed shock and revulsion at Isis atrocities and vowed to do something to stop them.
But Gaza has set a ghastly new, and much lower, norm for international behaviour. Some 2.3 million Palestinians are treated as sub-humans to be casually exterminated. More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the UN. Aid to survivors is blocked by Israel, as they huddle in rain battered tents where babies die of cold. The Sabra and Shatila and Camp Speicher massacres were hideous, but the mass killing took place on a single day. The slaughter in Gaza has been going on for 454 days at the time of writing. For relentless cruelty it is unequalled in modern times.
There is nothing secret about this ongoing war crime. The broken bodies of Palestinian children are on view on screens across the world night after night and Israel makes no serious bid to hide what is happening. As for any surviving Israeli hostages, it has always been obvious that only an end to the war will bring them home and that any time Israeli troops get near to where they are being held, they will be shot by their captors.
Denunciation by the US and UK of human rights violations in Russia, China and elsewhere in the world will in future ring out as the grossest hypocrisy, given their complicity or silence about the daily butchery in Gaza. Some may argue that shock expressed by American and British governments over atrocities anywhere in the world always focused largely on the misdeeds of political enemies. Yet, despite self-interested motives, fuzzy but important standards for governmental behaviour and for the protection of human rights had been established.
It is these same fragile norms that have now perished in the bomb blasts and rubble of Gaza. Violence inflicted as communal punishment on civilians is the new normal. Any idea that humanity might have progressed beyond the savagery that characterised the era between 1914 and 1945 is dead.
Beneath the Radar
Cold war propaganda makes it difficult to find out what is really happening in countries awarded pariah status by the US, UK and their allies. Much of the highest-quality reporting is disappearing behind paywalls. What, for instance, is happening in the vast Chinese region of Xinjiang where one million Uighurs have allegedly been thrown into “re-education camps”?
I have been reading Denis Staunton in the Irish Times, much the best Western newspaper correspondent now stationed in Beijing. Cool-headed and objective, his lucidly-written articles are highly informed, especially a piece he has just sent from Xinjiang about a bizarre tourist boom in one part of the region.
Cockburn’s Pick
Pundits traditionally recommend books they have read at the turn of the year. Most of these are newly published. But it seems to me that the truest sign of a good book to be unhesitatingly recommended to others is one that I have just re-read.
Here are two of them, one on William Cobbett, the great early 19th-century English radical journalist, and the other is about Charles Dickens.
The historian AJP Taylor wrote in his memoir that “every now and then someone asks me as a sort of parlour game, ‘who do you think is the greatest Englishman?’ I have never been at the loss for an answer. Samuel Johnson of course… Johnson was profound. He was moral. Above all he was human… still I have a qualm. There comes to my mind not perhaps the greatest Englishman but certainly the runner-up. This is William Cobbett.”
The quote comes from Richard Ingrams’s biography The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett, which I have just re-read. I followed this up by re-reading Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Charles Dickens, surely another runner-up for greatest Englishman.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
