The world is drowning in blood – Westerners, wake up

Telegraph

26-06-2025

It is almost four decades since the collapse of the Iron Curtain was meant to herald a new era, one in which the prospect of nuclear-armed states threatening to destroy the planet would be consigned to the past.
As the former subject states of the USSR embraced their liberty and freedom, prominent scholars such as America's Francis Fukayama predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, everyone would move forward to a new Western-led world order: peace and prosperity, not superpower rivalries, would be the motivating forces. Witness Fukayama's famous essay, 'The End of History?', published in November 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Today, it would be hard to find anyone in Western political circles who subscribed to this Panglossian view of modern history.
The latest generation of politicians are more likely to argue that the world has never faced greater peril. For them, instead of enjoying the prosperity of the post-Cold War 'peace dividend', we should be rebuilding our defensive capabilities after decades of abject neglect. Such was the main talking point at the recent Nato summit in The Hague. A study conducted at Uppsala University in Sweden found that 2024 saw the largest number of conflicts across the globe since the Second World War.
In such circumstances, it's vital that our leaders have an understanding of how conflicts develop, as well as the most effective means of resolving them. Such issues are examined in exhaustive detail by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills in their well-researched new book, The Art of War and Peace. The pair have decades of experience as policy advisers in conflicts as far apart as Afghanistan, Iraq and Colombia; as such, they're well-placed to provide a detailed analysis of the nature of modern war, from large-scale, high-intensity, state-on-state conflicts to irregular, low-intensity, smaller wars.
One of their central concerns is to show how the world has evolved from the 'end of history' mindset, and come to its present calamitous state, in which the failure of deterrence has led to the collapse of the international rules-based order. In the 1930s, Kilcullen and Mills argue, the terrible costs of war were fresh in everyone's memory, and the prospect of another war could thus spur rapid industrialisation and rearmament. By contrast, for most Westerners in 2025, the notion is a distant one. War, too many of us believe, is something conducted by others in faraway places.
As a result, Western leaders have often found themselves singularly ill-prepared to the challenges they suddenly face, whether it's the more aggressive military posture adopted by Russia under Vladimir Putin or China's emergence as a major power to rival the US. Kilcullen and Mills lament the failure of our politicians to acknowledge this rapidly changing global landscape, and suggest that it has resulted, at the grand-strategic level, in the erosion of credible deterrence on the part of the United States and its allies – and that this, in turn, has led to a decline in the Western powers' global influence.
For example, a significant portion of The Art of War and Peace focuses on how the Biden administration handled the US-led coalition's withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, a chaotic process that, the authors argue, led Putin to believe that he would encounter no serious opposition from the West if he proceeded with his plan to invade Ukraine in February 2022. They write:
The abject performance in Afghanistan led the Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese and every terrorist group on the planet to believe the Western alliance was weak. Chinese officials and state media outlets, for instance, repeatedly condemned the withdrawal, citing this action as evidence that the United States was an undependable partner and a declining power.
Kilcullen and Mills don't disagree with that assessment. 'The US,' they say, 'has repeatedly engaged in military interventions abroad, rallied coalitions and allies to support it, then blithely walked away when policymakers or the public became bored or distracted.' They conclude that 'Washington's unreliability remains an omnipresent danger for America's allies.'
On the other hand, the authors accept that ending wars in the modern age is more difficult than it was in previous eras. In the Second World War, the overwhelming military defeats suffered by Nazi Germany and Japan meant that they had no option to allow the Allies to declare total victory. This permitted the West to dictate peace terms. Conflicts these days are a great deal more messy, especially when other actors are involved, whether it's Western nations supporting Ukraine against Russia or Iran's continued backing for Hamas.
By far the most important conclusion to be drawn from this excellent study, then, is a broad and philosophical one: that the West can no longer afford to ignore the challenges presented by the changing nature of modern warfare. We must instead prepare – just as we did during the Cold War – to defend our liberty.
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