How to start a world war
Dominic Green
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We are approaching a pivotal moment in history. The local war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is one front in a regional war between Israel and Iran. The regional war between Israel and Iran is a proxy for America’s rivalry with Russia and China. So is the European proxy for that rivalry, the war in Ukraine. Add to that the endless standoff with another Chinese ally, North Korea, and the multiplying brush fires across the Sudanic belt of Africa, where Russia is fanning the flames. This is how a world war begins.
By the time you know a world war has begun, it’s too late. The powder trail to the war of 1914 was lit in 1906, with the first of several small wars in the Balkans as local nationalisms unpicked the borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The war of 1939, which was the war of 1941 for Americans, was the war of 1931 for the Chinese, and the war of 1933 for the Jews. The Japanese began their Asian rampage by invading Manchuria a full decade before Pearl Harbor.
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What time is it? Eight years passed between 1906 and 1914 and between 1931 and 1939. Eight years passed between the Iran deal of 2015 and the Iranian-sponsored war of 2023. History really does rhyme. Perhaps Barack Obama, the most professorial president since Woodrow Wilson, would like to share his thoughts with the class. But the beloved verbalist is strangely quiet these days.
When historians try to understand how local conflicts became global ones in 1914 and 1939, they look at those eight-year preludes. They see failure to control expansionist powers in time, and even appeasement as a decaying ruling class realizes too late what is happening. They see the hollowing of alliances, and how one era’s security guarantee becomes another era’s invitation to war. They see willed delusion, as when Britain’s leaders told themselves the war would be over by Christmas, or that Mr. Hitler was a reasonable chap even if he was beastly to the Jews. Complacency is behind all of these errors, and arrogance behind complacency.
They also see deeper causes. The Germans signaled their intent to dominate Europe 44 years before the war of 1914 by attacking France and declaring themselves an empire. It is now 44 years since the Iranian Revolution announced the rise of a new Persian empire in clerical guise. Another rhyme, though not quite a repetition. The German imperialism of 1914 was brutally militarist, but it was not eliminationist like that of 1939. The ideology of the mullahs who control Iran has been explicitly eliminationist toward the Jewish people for decades. This did not stop the Obama administration from, as Henry Kissinger put it, setting Iran on a “glide path” to nuclear weapons.
When the Obama team raised Iran to regional power, it hollowed its long-standing alliances with its regional clients, Israel and the Sunni Arab autocracies. The Biden administration doubled down. The result is the double humiliation of American diplomacy we saw in recent days. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken toured the capitals of America’s alleged Arab allies like a cut-price Kissinger, he got the brush-off from them all.
Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia is said to have kept Blinken waiting for eight hours. At least Blinken’s humiliation by MbS was private. In a press conference at Doha, the foreign minister of Qatar, which funds Hamas and hosts its leadership, refused to close down Hamas’s office while Blinken squirmed at his lectern. In Egypt, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi publicly degraded Blinken. “You said that you are a Jewish person,” El-Sisi said before the cameras, then denied Egypt’s modern history of persecuting its Jews. Blinken failed to correct him. His attempt to “As a Jew…” El-Sisi shows how deep the delusions of identity politics run in America’s institutions.
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Would the crisis of 1914 have been eased if the leaders of Britain and France had rushed to Sarajevo for a photo op? Or would it have assisted a gang of Serbian psychopaths in their effort to monopolize the world’s attention? President Joe Biden has already sent out the fleet. His visit to Israel was a stunt for the domestic vote in 2024. His attempt to get the Arabs onside after their rebuff of Blinken never got started. The leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority took the destruction of a Gazan hospital, most probably by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, as a pretext to refuse to meet him. As insults go, they might as well have thrown their sandals at Air Force One.
Niall Ferguson, in a grimly perspicacious article in the Sunday Times of London, sees the battle lines of a world war as the Heartland coheres against the Rimland: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea against the United States and its allies. As in the 1930s, the event horizon is narrowing toward catastrophe. The bungled Afghanistan withdrawal of 2021. The needlessly extended Ukraine war of 2022. The surprise Middle Eastern war of 2023 that everyone expected for years. Taiwan 2024?