History is not a cryptic manuscript; it is a blunt instrument. It has hammered one lesson into our collective skulls with brutal repetition: conflicts breed conflicts.
The Treaty of Versailles didn’t end the Great War – it fertilised the soil for World War II. The Cold War’s proxy battles didn’t secure peace – they seeded the ethnic cleansings of the 1990s.
We know the equation. Violence plus grievance equals more violence. So why, like moths with a death wish, do we still incinerate our sons and daughters on the altars of Mars?
The answer isn’t stupidity, though the evidence for that is strong and compelling. It is something far more uncomfortable: we go to war precisely because we know history. We go to war not despite the cycle, but because we are terrified of being the ones who lose in it.
The illusion of the “final war” is our oldest self-deception. Every generation believes its conflict is the exception. Leaders stand at podiums and promise that bombing a country will “prevent a wider war”, or that crushing an insurgent group today saves 10 wars tomorrow. This is the trap of the pre-emptive strike.
We convince ourselves that a small, surgical violence now is a vaccine against a pandemic of violence later. But violence is not a vaccine; it is a mutagen. It changes the enemy. It hardens the resistance. We look at Hamas or Putin or the Serbs and think, “If we just hit harder, they’ll learn.” They do learn – they learn hatred.
The second reason is dignity, which is a euphemism for pride. Realists will tell you war is about oil, water, or land. But scarcity doesn’t explain the trench warfare of 1916 or the suicidal charges of a cornered dictator. Humans go to war because the alternative – backing down, compromising, admitting that your dead soldiers died for a stalemate – feels like a fate worse than death. When a nation is humiliated, its calculus changes. Honour becomes a currency worth more than blood. We don’t go to war to win; we often go to war to stop losing face. And history, ironically, teaches us that appeasement failed in 1938, so we overcorrect: we assume that any concession is Munich, and any negotiation is surrender.
We also see this in the US-Iran skirmish.
But the darkest driver is the cheapest one: the short-term election cycle. Diplomacy is slow, boring, and looks weak in a campaign advertisement. War is fast, visceral, and provides a ready-made enemy. A president or prime minister facing economic collapse, a scandal, or flailing poll numbers can often find a foreign flag to burn.
It is a ghastly alchemy: turning political lead into martial gold. History taught us that the Balkan Wars led to Sarajevo. But politicians don’t read history for patterns; they read it for playbooks. “Churchill stood firm,” they whisper, ignoring the decades of blood that followed that firmness.
So we are trapped. We know the cycle. We teach the cycle in universities. We mourn the cycle in cemeteries. Yet when the next crisis comes – a disputed border, a broken treaty, a rising power rattling its sabre – we will do it again. Not because we forgot that conflicts breed conflicts. But because we have convinced ourselves that this time, our bombs will be the last ones.
They won’t be. The only war that ends all wars is the one we are too wise to start. And wisdom, it turns out, is the only weapon we have never learned to manufacture.
But wisdom is rarely the choice of such warmongers. Why they are given such positions in the first place is another question altogether.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.